Compensation is a crucial necessity that humans need to use for overcoming obstacles. These obstacles, which consist of fears, loss of innocence, and internal and external wars, occur throughout every stage in a person’s life. “Araby”, written by James Joyce, and “Miss Brill”, written by Katherine Mansfield, are two fictional short stories that consist of subtle alterations or experiences in people’s lives during the dawn of the 20th century in European countries. The protagonists share many similarities and differences throughout their experiences and solutions to their problems, consisting of the creation of fallacious relationships during difficult times. Miss Brill and the narrator from “Araby” suffer obstacles in their everyday lives The age difference impacts how the two cope and or grow from their problems. Miss Brill’s acts of concealing her age by criticizing old people in the park clearly represent how her greatest insecurity is her age. When the teenage boy exposes Miss Brill’s insecurity, he incites a blunt reality check in Miss Brill. Miss Brill’s lack of resilience causes her to suffer a long, confusing pain that is difficult to cope with. On the other hand, the narrator from “Araby” is perceived as a teenager experiencing “puppy” love. The narrator lives with his aunt and uncle, plays with his friends outdoors, and goes to school, all of which are characteristics that an adolescent would contain. Unlike Miss Brill, the teenager from “Araby” suffers his first fall of innocence. The new knowledge of the capability of acting as a, “...creature driven and derided by vanity…” is a painful idea for the boy (Joyce 4). However his resilient personality will allow him to cope and understand much faster than Miss Brill. Age has a great impact on how one reacts to life-changing experiences. The voids, created by the amount of time it requires for people to cope, are filled with uncontrollable emotions and unrealistic In “Araby”, the narrator suffers two ongoing events: war and adolescence. As a teenager the narrator tries to hide the fact that the world is changing, so he attaches himself to the idea of innocence and purity, qualities found in Mangan’s sister. The long glances and short conversations shared between the two provide the boy a source of hope and security, even though Mangan’s sister interprets the relationship as an innocent acquaintanceship. The narrator creates a fictitious yet strong love for the girl to compensate for the loss brought by the Irish Wars. Similarly to the young love in “Araby”, Miss Brill creates a false relationship with an entire community to compensate for her loneliness and fear of aging. The idea of being in a play gives Miss Brill a purpose in life and a way to fill her void of loneliness. When the author states, “No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn’t been there, she was part of the performance after all,” Miss Brill is given a responsibility and a role in her community (Mansfield 310). The many relationships formed in both stories provide the protagonists a distraction from their ongoing fears and wars. As well as, these bonds, though are false, allow the characters to make up for the voids found the stages of their
The theme of this book is that the human capacity to adapt to and find happiness in the most difficult circumstances. Each character in the novel shows this in their way. For instance, their family is randomly taken from their home and forced to work but they still remain a close nit family. In addition, they even manage to stick together after being separated for one of their own. These show how even in the darkest time they still manage to find a glimmer of hope and they pursued on.
As he grows older, his style changes and he sees the real world as it really is as opposed to his fantasies he had when he was younger. A major development in the story is the actual act of becoming a man. Boys his age have a festival for many days that lead up to their circumcision, after which they become men. After this accomplishment, he still writes about his fears and his thoughts but he is much more wary to keep them to himself. And as he grows even older he moves away from home to attend Technical College for four years. These years change him very much and when he returns home he is much more of an adult and conducts himself in such a manner.
Although Rivka Galchen’s “Wild Berry Blue” and James Joyce’s “Araby” have some differences, there even more similarities. The narrators, their journeys, and their conclusions at the end of their journeys are analogous. Both attempt to win over the object of their affection through a gift, and yet thorough the purchase of that gift they realize their folly in love. As Joyce wrote “Araby” in 1914, yet Galchen did not write “Wild Berry Blue” until nearly 100 years later, Galchen may have written “Wild Berry Blue” as a modern retelling of Joyce’s classic short story.
A person’s life is often a journey of study and learning from errors and mistakes made in the past. In both James Joyce’s Araby and John Updike’s A&P, the main characters, subjected to the events of their respective stories, are forced to reflect upon their actions which failed to accomplish their original goal in impressing another character. Evidently, there is a similar thematic element that emerges from incidents in both short stories, which show maturity as an arduous process of learning from failures and a loss of innocence. By analyzing the consequences of the interaction of each main character; the Narrator in Araby and Sammy in A&P; and their persons of infatuation, Mangan’s sister
Joyce, James. “Araby”. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Eds. R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch. Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2000. 427 - 431.
“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...
First romantic encounters by young boys are often wrought with many different emotions and illusions. In “Araby”, a portrayal of a young boy’s experience of romantic reality, the reader is witness to the narrator’s physical, emotional and chronological journey. The emotional reactions, anguish and anger, show the importance of the events in the young boy’s life. The deprecating word vanity is significant to the story’s theme, because while anguish and anger are emotional reactions, the admission of vanity is a severe moral judgment of oneself. Anguish is regarded as the key emotion in the young boy’s childhood. In James Joyce’s “Araby”, the exaggerated anguish of the narrator seems quite pretentious given the reality of his youthful perception.
Miss Brill is advanced in years. She has been coming weekly to the gardens for “‘a long time’” (100). Furthermore, the two young lovers describe her as an “‘an old thing”’ (100).
In James Joyce’s “Araby” a young boy living in a dark and grave world develops an obsessive adoration with an older girl who lives in his neighborhood and his devotion towards her ultimately forces him to make a promise to her he is incapable of keeping, resulting in a life changing epiphany.
James Joyce’s “Araby” and the story of “A & P” by John Updike have many characteristic similarities as well as literary traits. These stories focus on a young man trying to learn the difference between the romantic fantasies that play in their mind and the bitterness that reality can bring to a young man. In both stories a young man has built an unrealistic expectation of women only to meet the tragic despair of being rejected by the object of their boyish fantasy. In both of these stories the authors choose to show that life is not always what it may always appear.
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 short story “Araby” by James Joyce is told by what seems to be the first person point of view of a boy who lives just north of Dublin. As events unfold the boy struggles with dreams versus reality. From the descriptions of his street and neighbors who live close by, the reader gets an image of what the boy’s life is like. His love interest also plays an important role in his quest from boyhood to manhood. The final trip to the bazaar is what pushes him over the edge into a foreshadowed realization. The reader gets the impression that the narrator is the boy looking back on his epiphany as a matured man. The narrator of “Araby” looses his innocence because of the place he lives, his love interest, and his trip to the bazaar.
The narrator cannot stop himself from fantasizing about her perfections, such as when “the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing” (Joyce 2). Through his constant thoughts about Mangan’s sister and her physical beauty, the narrator reveals an intricate piece of his innate desires. It isn’t exactly Mangan’s sister that continually captivates his heart, but his idea of her and her greater embodiment of love. Ironically, despite the fact that she is the source of all the action that takes place in “Araby”, the narrator reveals very little about her. In “Exhibition and Inhibition: The Body Scene in Dubliners”, Sheila Conboy wrote, “While the boy narrates the process of his sexual awakening, the girl remains anonymous, merely the petticoated object of his desire, never given a voice to express a desire of her own” (Conboy 4). Because the narrator treats Mangan’s sister as only an object of desire -- as opposed to a person capable of desires -- reality is destined to disappoint him. Through Mangan’s sister, we come to understand that the narrator at the end of the story is not only distraught because his idea of love has been dashed, but ashamed that
As childhood is the first stage in life, in Dubliners, Araby is projected as a short story in which the main character is striving for a love that can only be bought. The young boy symbolizes pure hope. He has exotic dreams to meet and be with this girl that he admires and loves. The pressure to get her attention blinds him and everything comes crashing down as the bazzar closes and he does not get a chance to buy her a gift. He was looking for guidance from his uncle, but his uncle is preoccupied getting drunk. At the bazzar the boy realizes that he has been blinded by love, and that his childhood dreams will never become a reality. In Araby, the epiphany occurs right at the end as he says: “gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Araby 28). These last sentences symbolize how crushed and hopeless he is, as well as his inability to move forward. Mangan’s sister represented ho...