Araby By James Joyce

571 Words2 Pages

“There’s a big difference between falling in love and being in love. There’s a big difference between infatuation and falling in love” (McGraw). Style, tone, the uses of language, formal & informal diction, and figures of speech are significantly extant throughout “Araby.” In “Araby” James Joyce’s effective use of style, tone and language communicates the character’s fascination and subsequent disillusionment. The boy in “Araby” is infatuated with his friend Mangan’s sister. In the story the boy admitted that he watched her morning after morning: “Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart …show more content…

I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her” (Joyce, 359). Although he did this daily, Mangan’s sister never noticed him, but his love for her seemed to grow stronger because he began thinking about her “...even in places the most hostile to romance” (Joyce, 359). It is almost as if his feelings were consuming him because her name would spring to his lips in his moments of prayers and praises, and he often got teary-eyed without explanation, which caused confusion. The boy began to wonder if he would ever get a chance to talk to her, and luckily he did. One day Mangan’s sister addressed him and she asked him if he was going to Araby, which is a bazaar “...that represents the allure of the strange and exotic for the young narrator” (Joyce, 358). Unfortunately, she could not attend because she had a retreat in her convent school [a local community or house of a religious order or congregation] (Convent), so the boy became her knight in shining armor and said, “If I go...I will bring you something” (Joyce, 360). According to Ben Collins, “His love intensifies the illusion that the world has romantic and religious content, and he can go through

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