James Joyce. Araby

1. In Joyce’s short story, the young narrator views Araby as a symbol of the mysteriousness and seduction of the Middle East. When he crosses the river to attend the bazaar and purchase a gift for the girl, it is as if he is crossing into a foreign land. But his trip to the bazaar disappoints and disillusions him, awakening him to the rigid reality of life around him. The boy’s dream to buy some little thing on bazaar is roughly divided on the callousness of adults who have forgotten about his request.

And Dublin bazaar with alluring oriental-sounding name “Arabia” is a pathetic parody of the real holiday. 2. Although James Joyce’s story “Araby” is told from the first person viewpoint of its young protagonist, we do not think that a boy tells the story. Instead, the narrator seems to be a man matured well beyond the experience of the story. The mature man reminisces about his youthful hopes, desires, and frustrations.

Because of the double focused narration of the story, first by the boy’s experience, then by a mature experienced man, the story gives a wider portrait to using sophisticated irony and symbolic imagery necessary to analyze the boy’s character. 3. Mangan’s sister is the other central character in the story. The narrator shows us in ironic manner that in his youthful adoration of Mangan’s sister she is the embodiment of all his boyish dreams of the beauty, of physical desire and, at the same time, the embodiment of his adoration of all that is holy.

Her image, constantly with him, makes him feel as though he bears a holy “chalice” through a “crowd of foes”– the Saturday evening throng of drunken men, bargaining women, cursing laborers, and all the others who have no conception of the mystical beauty his young mind has created in this world of material ugliness. 4. Joyce very clearly defined his creative task in the “Dubliners”: “My intention was to write a chapter of the spiritual history of my country, and I chose the scene of Dublin, because this city is the center of paralysis “.

The opening paragraph, setting the scene prepares us for the view we receive of the conflict between the loveliness of the ideal and the drabness of the actual. Long monotonous periods, the rhythm and the threefold repetition of the word “blind” in the sense of impasse and blind create comic discrepancy between the title of the story and its beginning. 5. James Joyce uses dark and gloomy references to create the exact mood or atmosphere. Dark time of day (night) is used throughout the story and darkness is the prevailing theme.

Joyce writes repetitively of the dark as a direct representation of the boy’s life. The boy plays in the dark, he hides in the dark, and he lives in the dark. The darkness is where he comes to an epiphany, and where he matures as a boy. The narrator’s perception of the darkness causes him to reflect on his own isolation and loneliness. The nameless boy’s destiny is in the darkness of Dublin, and Joyce knows there is no escaping this. In the end of the story, the boy suddenly awakens to the bleakness of the humdrum life around him.