Araby By James Joyce

Shaurya Singh

Prof. Kaye

English M01 A

12th October 2014 DREAMER TO REALIST

James Joyce “Araby” is an emotional short story of a nameless boy who leads a carefree life in a Dublin neighborhood before falling in love with his friend 's sister. The idea which Joyce promotes with the story revolves around, how the boy reacts to the feelings for his crush? Joyce spends most of his time introducing the boy’s thought on the area in which he lives, and how he senses about the life he has been so far? A portion of the story describes that the girl and the boy never talked before, but when they finally speak, the girl mentions the existence of an exotic bazaar in town, named "Araby". The

The boy feels very emotionless about the place where he lives. Joyce continuously uses negative adjectives while describing the surroundings, Joyce writes, “North Richmond Street, being blind………..the other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces” (Joyce 550). Joyce uses words like “blind” in the sense that the street has a dead end. He then describes the other houses on the street and the families living in them. He uses words like “decent” and “imperturbable” which describe the nature of family members and how calm they are. Before we could understand more about surrounding, Joyce introduces us to the boy’s crush, someone who puts smile on boy’s face. He says, “Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side” (Joyce 550). This quote shows us that how closely the boy observes his crush. Mangan’s sister was the one who used to make the boy happy, and the one who makes his “Heart Leaped” (Joyce 550), yet none of this was nothing more than his hormonal instincts because we come to know that he “Had never spoken to her” (Joyce 550) and has no idea what kind of person she is. Mangan 's sister somewhat resembles a religious symbol in the story. The narrator is devoted to her much like a religious person is devoted to God. The connection between Mangan 's sister and religious worship is evidenced in the passage

Joyce describes it as, “The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall” (Joyce 553). The stalls seemed dark and foreign, and also have an uninviting presence. The boy expected a positive experience but notices that the lady and two men at the stall were speaking with English accents. Joyce describes that the boy experiences something that he sees very often in his hometown of Dublin and this familiar experience increased the disappointment for the