Most critics analyze “Araby” from the perspective of self-maturity. In Shi Xiaojing’s “Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby”, she argues that “Araby” tells a story of a young boy’s disillusionment as he meets his first adult feelings of love, but is denied by the ruthless reality and shows how people usually expect more than that which reality can provide and consequently feel disappointed when they do not receive their expectation. Just as what she says, “Araby” is much more that a story of first love, in fact, it is a portrait of a world that defies the ideal and the dream (190). Besides, in “No Way Out” by Zhang Wenjie, she thinks that in “Araby” James Joyce puts the boy’s personal yearning for idealized romance via several irresistible hindrances so as to reveal the doomed pointlessness of an inpidual’s holding his ideal and passion in a reality with prevailing spiritual paralysis (219).

Some critics also discuss the religious issues that result in the pergence between the boy’s fantasy and reality. In the scholarship “James Joyce: A Critical Guide”, this point is clearly stated by Lee Spinks. In literature, a symbol or image is a thing that stands for something else by reason of relationship, association, especially a visible sign of something invisible. And one noticeable feature of the short story is that there are quite a lot many religious images. Such images contribute not only to the story of the boy’s first love, but also deepen the theme that James Joyce wants to convey, that is, the confusion and decline of religious belief and the conflict between the fantasy and reality (10).

In “Studying the fictions of James Joyce”, Lv Guoqing points out that in order to expose the vision of the boy, and gather the relative events through the boy’s view together in the story, the author uses two perspectives in the story: the boy’s and the grown man’s. This special point makes the character of the boy more successive (83). Similar ideas can be seen in Wu Haiping’s “The Ironic Narrator of James Joyce’s Araby”, through analyzing the third-person limited perspective in the story, he believes the author is in an attempt to explore the ironic view presented of the institutions and persons surrounding the boy (94).