I'm writing an essay on Joyce's views on growing up. I need help identifying themes to provide structure for a thesis.The story I am mostly...

In his letters to Nora Barnacle, whom he was to share his
life of social and intellectual rebellion, James Joyce
wrote,

My mind
rejects the whole present social order and
Christianity....

Joyce
perceived in Dublin a city of lower middle-class people subjugated politically by the
British and spiritually by the Catholic Church.  It is a city, to Joyce, that is the
"centre of paralysis." With its brown houses and dead-end streets, Joyce symbolizes the
social and spiritual malaise of the Irish people in a work that is written much like a
stages of man.  In Dubliners, the stories of adolescents, with
their dreams and illusions, are always ones of failures; "Araby" is such a
story.

In the opening paragraphs of this story, the house
in which the boy lives is described as musty; there is a "wild garden" behind the house
that contains an apple-tree and "a few straggling bushes" near "dark muddy lanes."  The
boy discovers books read by the former tenant, a priest, one of which is a prurient
secular work that has been read much as the pages are yellowed.  This is the book that
the youth likes the most.  So, with the symbolic apple tree and the book of temptations,
The Memoirs of Vidocq, along with the youth's lying on the parlor
floor in order to watch Mangan's sister through the blind, the religious imagery of the
boy's love as he imagines that he bears his "chalice through a throng of foes" seems,
like the priest, rather tainted.  His romantic illusions, too, suggest the confusion of
the spiritual with the prurient:

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Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange
prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.  My eyes were often full of
tears...and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my
bosom. 

There is, likewise, a
confusion within the youth's mind of the exotic with the mundane. For, while he youth
imagines the bazaar as a place where he and Mangan's sister will meet and spend an
enchanted evening, he finds himself going alone on a disappointing journey to find
darkened stalls and a "silence like that which pervades a church after a service" where
men count money. As the youth listens to "the fall of the coins," he has an epiphanal
realization that the pursuit of his ideal that he has elevated as religious in nature is
unattainable and foolish.