The narrated and its negatives: the nonnarrated and the disnarrated in Joyce's Dubliners - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

Style, Fall, 1993 by Harold F. Mosher, Jr.

As a variation on the missing antecedent to a pronoun, a combination of that device with a noun and no antecedent is used at the end of "Araby." The boy, discouraged in his futile quest almost to the point of forgetting (not being able to narrate to himself) why he had come to the bazaar, wanders through the darkening hall looking for a gift and hears instead a truncated, pointless (to him) conversation between unnamed people with English accents (another sign of the stranger, the unknown, as in "After the Race"). The major reason for the "foreignness" of the conversation is that it lacks an antecedent, a referent:

--O, I never said such a thing!

. . . .

--Didn't she say that?

. . . .

--O, there's a . . . fib! (35)

Clearly, the absence of an antecedent adds an element of strangeness to the foreign atmosphere created by the English accents. In his own land, the boy feels out of place, but, then, he had come to the bazaar expecting a foreign experience. Ironically, as in the boys' unexpected, "foreign" adventure in "An Encounter" (the preceding story), the boy's expectations of an exotic, Oriental environment (he does examine "porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets," suggestive of the Orient) are met with the reality of the nearby and not-so-exotic foreign. Added to the "fib," the lie, of his not encountering what he thought was promised, is the utter absence of the gift, the emptiness of his mission, symbolized by the hall's darkness and silence, a silence akin to the absent antecedent in a conversation that continues meaninglessly on "the same subject" (35).

The most obvious sign of the variety of the nonnarrated on which we have been concentrating--the suggested name, object, act, idea, words, or state the identification of whose complete nature is delayed or left incomplete--is the ellipsis mark, which can serve several purposes. For instance, in "A Little Cloud," Chandler, in thinking about Gallaher before meeting him at Corless's, cannot quite identify the elusive quality that singles out Gallaher: "There was always a certain . . . something in Ignatius Gallaher that impressed you in spite of yourself" (72). Whereas the ellipsis may indicate a pause in Chandler's thought as he searches for the right word (and cannot find it) to identify the admirable quality in Gallaher, the ellipsis might be taken by the reader as the sign of an absent quality that in his disnarration Chandler seeks to supply. Similarly, in "Araby" during the estranging conversation at the bazaar that we just glanced at, the ellipsis in "O, there's a . . . fib!" (35) may also signal a hesitation before the unnamed character decides on the word "fib." The difference from the function of the ellipsis in "A Little Cloud" is that here the word is found, but the hesitation may imply that "fib" is not the precise word to name the thought, which may be stronger: that is, what is meant may be lie, a word that would comment more accurately on the inadequacy of reality to satisfy the boy's notion of such words as bazaar or Araby. The quality that is absent in reality but that does exist in the boy's mind is not accurately named. One might say that there are two absences--the missing but potentially present quality in reality (a disnarrated) and the missing word--and only one presence: the ideal notion in the boy's mind, which is not named (the nonnarrated).