How would you describe James Joyce's tone and attitude toward his characters in "Araby"?

An interesting aspect of this first person point of view in Araby is the multiple distances the story constructs: first there is the child, then there is the adult child, and then their is the author behind all three.The child thinks one way, the adult (with more experience) presents the child in a way the child would not understand, and then the author behind the entire story has a greater perspective, which encompasses issues of class, religion, sentiment, and romance that go beyond even that of the immediate narrator.  with this thrice removed distance of author to character (all of them), the author does have a more god-like stance in terms of his knowledge.  He knows more than even the narrator the blindness (the dead-end quality) of this child's life, even from the beginning, and he knows the emptiness of Araby as well.  More importantly, he knows the longing all humans have for such a place of romance, a place where we become able to bring back to another something special, making us special as we do so.  Neither the boy nor the adult appreciate this as the author does.  Rather than cold, I would argue that the author, Joyce, is compassionate toward this experience, kind and generous, not considering the child stupid or clumsy but, like all of us, flawed in our aspirations toward wanting more from our otherwise dull lives.