Our perception about the world change as we grow up and experience the reality of life. This is the necessary and universal experience that we all must undergo to face the world successfully. The protagonists in James Joyce’s “Araby” and Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls experience a common initiation of how different the world is, compared to how they would like to see. The reader is given a glance into the lives of two adolescents. The protagonists in both stories are of the growing age and their perceptions about the world change. These changes contradict with their past perceptions and leads life in a different direction. Both Joyce and Munro unfold series of bizarre life thrilling experience from the daily life of the protagonists to create the universal lesson of how different the world is, compare to how they would like to see. But the way, this necessary and universal lesson learn differs with each protagonist. The boy’s initiation in “Araby” comes, when the girl (Mangan’s sister) come in his life. After his encounter with her his life completely change forever and he wants to be his own man. The initiation of the Young girl in “Boys and Girls” comes, after watching the shooting of horse “Mack” and letting “Flora” the other horse, out of the gate. Letting Flora free is indeed the protagonist’s way of watching world. After watching shooting of “Mack” she does not want “Flora” to face the same miserable death like “Mack”. She thinks letting Flora free save Flora from shooting.
The story “Araby” opens with a description of North Richmond Street. This gives reader the first view of the young boy's world. The Richmond Street “was a quiet street except.....the boys free” (Joyce 345). The young boy in “Araby” lives with his aunt a...
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...n this world. After realizing of truth about life and world and disobeying her father, she goes into her room. Makes her part of the room fancier and “keep my section separate from Liard” (Munro 335). After finding out the truth her father called her a girl. She “didn't protest that, even in my heart.” (Munro 336)
In “Araby” and “Boys and Girls” the plots illustrate that both of the adolescents experience the common phase of growing up. They learn the universal lesson of how different the world is, compared to how they would like to see. The young boy in “Araby” grows into a young man and the girl in “Boys and Girls” accepts the reality that she is a girl. Freeing the horse was like freeing herself. The protagonists in both stories go through learning experience that we all go through, but the way in which these learning experience occur differs with each of us.
We like to think that anything is possible. When certain inevitabilities or obstacles are brought into light, one learns to cope with their own lack of control. This is exactly the conflict that the characters of James Joyce’s “Araby” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” have to face. Although these characters have many differences between them, they both live their lives similarly. First of all, both the boy in “Araby” and the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” have no control over their lives. In addition, these characters experience isolation as a result of their controlled lives. Finally, that feeling of isolation drives
This essay has compared the differences between the societies in these two novels. There is one great similarity however that both make me thankful for having been born into a freethinking society where a person can be truly free. Our present society may not be truly perfect, but as these two novels show, it could be worse.
Both Paul from “Paul’s Case” and the unnamed boy in “Araby” were searching for a permanent escape from the reality that they lived in. They each longed for a life filled with glamor, romance, and luxuries. Most importantly, they craved a life far from ordinary. Both protagonists failed to achieve this life style. The way that they dealt with their failure is the main thing that separates them. The main concept that ties both these incredible short stories together is that neither of them was able to achieve their dream. They wanted a permanent escape, which neither of them was capable of accomplishing.
In the introductions of James Joyce's Araby and Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party the main themes of the stories are immediately introduced, as in any effective short story. Through the detailed descriptions of the settings, the central themes of each story are presented. The relationships between the main characters and their respective families are introduced and provide background information which helps to further understand the themes of each story. The main themes of the stories are further developed when the characters are introduced. In the introductions of Araby and The Garden Party the main themes are introduced through the descriptive settings, the family backgrounds, and the development of the main characters.
...the future to see that his life is not ruined by acts of immaturity. And, in “Araby”, we encounter another young man facing a crisis of the spirit who attempts to find a very limiting connection between his religious and his physical and emotional passions. In all of these stories, we encounter boys in the cusp of burgeoning manhood. What we are left with, in each, is the understanding that even if they can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, we can. These stories bind all of us together in their universal messages…youth is something we get over, eventually, and in our own ways, but we cannot help get over it.
“Araby” tells the story of a young boy who romanticizes over his friend’s older sister. He spends a lot of time admiring the girl from a distance. When the girl finally talks to him, she reveals she cannot go to the bazaar taking place that weekend, he sees it as a chance to impress her. He tells her that he is going and will buy her something. The boy becomes overwhelmed by the opportunity to perform this chivalrous act for her, surely allowing him to win the affections of the girl. The night of the bazaar, he is forced to wait for his drunken uncle to return home to give him money to go. Unfortunately, this causes the boy to arrive at the bazaar as it is closing. Of the stalls that remained open, he visited one where the owner, and English woman, “seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty” (Joyce 89) and he knows he will not be able to buy anything for her. He decides to just go home, realizing he is “a creature driven and derided with vanity” (Joyce 90). He is angry with himself and embarrassed as he...
Within every story or poem, there is always an interpretation made by the reader, whether right or wrong. In doing so, one must thoughtfully analyze all aspects of the story in order to make the most accurate assessment based on the literary elements the author has used. Compared and contrasted within the two short stories, “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid, and John Updike’s “A&P,” the literary elements character and theme are made evident. These two elements are prominent in each of the differing stories yet similarities are found through each by studying the elements. The girls’ innocence and naivety as characters act as passages to show something superior, oppression in society shown towards women that is not equally shown towards men.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
“A & P” by John Updike and “Araby” by James Joyce are two short stories that have both similarities and differences between them. Even though these stories were written in different countries, at different times, they still have many similarities. Both stories are about teenage boys, that live normal lives and both go through changes due to girls by the end of the story. By looking at the setting and the context included in both stories, the reader can notice the similarities and differences between them.
In the story, “Boys and Girls”, the narrator is not the only one coming to terms with their identity.
He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city and has developed into an individual sensitive to the fact that his town’s vivacity has receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residue of empty piety, and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and mankind that no longer exists. Although the young boy cannot fully comprehend it intellectually, he feels that his surroundings have become malformed and ostentatious. He is at first as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by mitigating his carelessness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his community. Upon hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, inherently, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is never quite the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the disagreeable and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the single sensation of life disintegrating. At the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this
Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” is a story about a girl that struggles against society’s ideas of how a girl should be, only to find her trapped in the ways of the world.
The boy sees the bazaar at Araby as an opportunity to win her over, as a way to light the candle in her eyes. However, the boy is more awkward then shy, his adolescence is an impediment to his quest and he lost for words to speak. I vividly recall those times in my young life, driven by desires and struggling with the lack of experience to get through the moment.
In many cultures, childhood is considered a carefree time, with none of the worries and constraints of the “real world.” In “Araby,” Joyce presents a story in which the central themes are frustration, the longing for adventure and escape, and the awakening and confusing passion experienced by a boy on the brink of adulthood. The author uses a single narrator, a somber setting, and symbolism, in a minimalist style, to remind the reader of the struggles and disappointments we all face, even during a time that is supposed to be carefree.
Many people think that boys in our culture today are brought up to define their identities through heroic individualism and competition, particularly through separation from home, friends, and family in an outdoors world of work and doing. Girls, on the other hand, are brought up to define their identities through connection, cooperation, self-sacrifice, domesticity, and community in an indoor world of love and caring. This view of different male and female roles can be seen throughout children’s literature. Treasure Island and The Secret Garden are two novels that are an excellent portrayal of the narrative pattern of “boy and girl” books.