Literary experts interpret Joyce’s short story differently. These differences in their interpretation were perhaps borne of the story’s shortness and a dearth of definite meanings that it leaves it, readers, to interpret it in several ways. It may have been intentional or unintentional but it is important to note that in a personal interview with James Joyce by Vanity Fair, he mentioned that readers should not take him too seriously. This may be another allegorical answer or perhaps the writer is too much a genius for what is mirth to him is considered a scholarly inquiry in the generations that succeeded him to interpret what he really meant in his short story Clay.

Of these authors that attempted to interpret the meanings of Joyce’s Clay, the paper will cite two authors, namely William Noon, S.J. who interpreted the short story under the lens of spirituality and religion where Marie was taken as a “saint” as well as a “woman” and Margot Norris who took the story as a strong expression of desire in human discourse and human lives. The variation of their interpretation may have been due to the different points of reference they made in the novel. For Noon’s religious interpretation, this may have been due to the reference of Mrs. Donnely’s remark that Maria would enter a convent before the year was out because she had got the prayer-book. This remark might have explained why Maria had been single all those years. For Norris on the other hand, it may be the circumstance of Maria.