The priest’s waste room is a symbol of—among other forces of convention—the style of fiction Joyce shows up as so much clichéd trash. For this reason it’s important to know not only what the texts therein are about but how they’re written.
Compare the opening paragraph of “Araby” to the opening paragraphs from the texts in the priest’s waste room—the waste room of nineteenth-century writing, in other words:
The opening paragraph of Sir Walter Scott's The Abbot (1820)
The opening lines of The Devout Communicant, Exemplified in His Behavior Before, At, and After the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper: Practically Suited to All the Parts of that Divide Ordinance (1869, edited from the sixth edition of 1683)
The opening paragraph of The Memoirs of Vidocq: Principal Agent of the French Police (1828, translated into English in 1834)
Tags: 2009, James Joyce, Short stories, Vocabulary
