araby essay conclusion

“Araby” by James Joyce Literature Analysis Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Araby is a short story written by James Joyce; it focuses on an Irish teenage boy who is emerging from adolescent fantasies into the unkind realities of everyday life in his homeland. He doesn’t reveal his identity but narrates his story in 1st person. For readers familiar with Joyce’s literary work, it is obvious that he symbolizes the author. This Araby analysis examines how the boy goes through a disillusioning moment that distorts his ideals.

Those experiences alter his viewpoint concerning the world around him. The boy is discovering his deep emotional feelings towards a woman for the first time; he is fantasizing and noticing the women around him. Our Araby essay explores the boy’s involvement with a woman, evident from his fantasies and imagination. He is experiencing intense sexual desires.

The author concentrates largely on his characters instead of the plot to disclose the ironies built on self-deception. From a different perception, the short story is the commencement of a boy’s pursuit of the ideal. This pursuit, however, fails but brings about an inner consciousness and a step to adulthood.

From another perspective, the short story involves a mature man recalling his experiences because the short story is narrated in retrospect by a grown man who remembers a specific moment of profound insight and meaning. Per se, the boy’s experience is not limited to the youth’s first love encounters. Instead, it depicts an ongoing problem throughout life: the inappropriateness of the ideal, of the fantasy as one desires it to be, with the drabness of reality. This dual focus, the first experiences of a young boy and a mature man who remembers these experiences, creates a dramatic depiction of a short story.

The character of the boy is obliquely revealed in the opening setting of the short story. He was raised in the backwash of a vanishing city. Symbolic images portray him to be a person who is insightful to the fact that the vivacity of his city has faded and left remains of empty piousness, the weakest echo of passion, and merely symbolic reminiscences of a vigorous concern for people and God. Even though the young boy can’t understand this rationally, he believes that the street, the city, and Ireland have become dull and self-satisfied. It is a world of religious stagnation, which makes the boy’s viewpoint very limited. He is uninformed and thus innocent.

Alone, imaginative, and secluded, he lacks the comprehension needed for appraisal and perception. He is initially as blind as the world he lives in, but the author prepares the readers for his ultimate understanding arousal by confiscating his blindness with an unconscious rebuttal of the world’s spiritual stagnation, which is apparent in the disillusioned scene of him reaching the bazaar (Eskandari, 417). The way of thinking of the boy is also apparent in the opening scenes. Spirituality controls the lives of North Richmond Street people, but it is a fading religion and gets only lip service. However, the boy, getting into the new understanding of first love, discovers his glossary within the experiences of his spiritual training and the passionate tales he has read.

The outcome is a naive and puzzled understanding of love founded on quasi-spiritual terms and the descriptions of romance. This fusion of two mythologies, i.e., the Christian with sacrifice and hope symbols and the Oriental with its delicate heroism symbols and escape, combine to create in his mind a deceptive world of spiritual and idyllic beauty.

This combination, which forms an “epiphany” for the young boy as he escorts his aunt through the bazaar, allows the reader to experience with unexpected enlightenment the thoughts and texture of his young mind (Yaya, 155). The reader sees the vainness and obstinacy of his quest. He interprets the world blindly through the images of his dreams.

The boy is unusually infatuated with his naive romanticism and obduracy. He must wake up to the hassle of the world surrounding him and respond. Hence, the first half of the short story foreshadows (as the grown man later comprehends) the awakening and disenchantment of the boy (Joyce, 24-25). The boy has gone through so many changes as the author takes us through his boyhood and manhood. His boyhood is filled with great imaginations and fantasies, and when he is a grown man, he remembers and realizes all the disillusionments. Most of these changes are taking place in his mind and formed images in his naïve mind.

The Araby analysis demonstrates the story of the boy’s vain quest stresses his lonely romanticism and his facility to acquire the viewpoints he now has. The pursuit ends when he gets to the marketplace and realizes with gradual, tormented clearness that Araby is not in any way what he expected or imagined. It is gaudy and murky and succeeds on the profit motive, and the undying allure of its name stirs up in people. The boy realizes that he put all his optimism and love into a world that is not real except in his innocent imagination.

He feels irritated and betrayed and realizes he has been deceiving himself. He thinks he is being driven and disdained by his vanity. The man, recalling this surprising experience from his teenage years, remembers the time he understood that living this dream was no longer a possibility. At the end of the short story, Joyce allows the readers to discover “ the creature driven and derided by vanity. ”

Joyce, James. 2021. Dubliners . Delhi, Beyond Books Hub.

Eskandari, Safoura. 2020. “Language Discourse in James Joyces Short Stories The Grace and The Araby: A Cultural Studies.” Budapest International Research and Critics in Linguistics and Education 3 (1): 411-420.

Yaya, Chen. 2023. “The Grown Up Version of Adolescent Crush–Self-Differentiation in “Araby.” Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 6 (1): 154-158.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › British Literature › Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 6, 2022

One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners , which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its predecessors, “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” “Araby” tells the story of an unfortunate fall from innocence, as a young boy comes to recognize the sorry state of the world in which he lives. On the whole, Joyce’s home city is not kindly portrayed in these stories; he set out in Dubliners to produce what he called “a moral history of my country,” with a particular focus on the supposed “centre of paralysis,” Dublin itself. “Araby” and the other stories of Dublin’s youth are tales of initiation into this gray world.

As is the case with most of the stories in Dubliners, “Araby” takes its inspiration from remembered fragments of the author’s own childhood, including the Joyce family’s sometime residence on Dublin’s North Richmond Street, the Christian Brothers’ School that Joyce and some of his siblings briefly attended, and the “Araby” bazaar that passed through the city in May, 1894, when Joyce would have been 12 years old. Yet although Joyce’s life is deeply woven into his art, neither “Araby” nor any of his other works are merely autobiographical. These remembered elements come together in a story of a young boy in the intense grip of his first love, who imagines himself dispatched on a romantic quest by his beloved, only to realize in the end that his romantic notions were the naive fantasies of a child.

The dismal state of Joyce’s Dublin is suggested in part by the gloomy atmosphere of the story. We are twice reminded in the opening moments that North Richmond Street is “blind.” At its dead end is an empty house, and along one side is a school whose description likens it to a prison. The “brown imperturbable faces” of the other houses suggest a neighborhood of pious moralists keeping each other under constant surveillance. The young boy’s own home is redolent of a past that persists in a stale and unpleasant form: The “air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms.” The house’s former tenant, a priest who passed away there, has left numerous uninspiring reminders of himself, from the rusty bicycle pump in the garden to the “old useless papers” scattered about the place. The narrator hints that the old man was at home among the street’s “brown imperturbable faces” when he tells us that the supposedly charitable old man left all of his money to unspecified “institutions” and only the furniture of his house to his sister.

“Araby” is set in the short days of winter, whose cold and dark further underscore its gloomy atmosphere. Throughout, light contends weakly with an encroaching darkness. The boys’ evening play takes place among houses “grown sombre” and beneath a violet sky toward which “the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns.” As the boy arrives at the nearly empty bazaar in the story’s closing moments, the lights are turned off in the gallery of the hall, leaving him “gazing up into the darkness.” Amid the persistent gloom, however, stands the radiant object of the boy’s devotion, Mangan’s sister, “her figure defined by the light.”

The young boy’s ability to see dazzling light in the midst of overwhelming darkness is a function of the romantic idealism that is gradually stripped from him by his decidedly unromantic world. Even the scattered leavings of the dead priest, which include Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance The Abbot , together with the memoirs of the adventurous criminal-turned-detective, Eug ne Fran ois Vidocq, afford him fuel for his romantic imagination. Until the story reaches its sad conclusion, the boy is able to keep the darkness at bay, running happily through the darkened street with his young friends and transforming the clamor of the market on a Saturday evening into the backdrop for his imagined knight’s quest. There he imagines “that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”; however, the boy’s adventure-story version of his world is challenged by the songs of the street singers, with their allusions to O’Donovan Rossa and other reminders of “troubles in our native land.” The boy imagines his adventurous life despite the political troubles whose effects are felt and sung all around him. For a while, he imagines himself able to transcend such concerns and inhabit a thrilling realm of heroism and perfect love.

However, in the end his world will not sustain these happy illusions. The name of the Araby bazaar promises an Eastern exoticism entirely absent from the tawdry affair he finally experiences. Having imagined himself a questing knight, the boy encounters in Araby his Chapel Perilous, a defiled temple where “two men were counting money on a salver,” and his heroic selfimage crumbles during his encounter with the young woman at the stall he visits, who clearly regards him as a young nuisance. He witnesses in the flirtatious but shallow exchange between the young woman and the two gentleman a version of love considerably less operatic than the devotion that brought him to Araby, and he comes to see himself as a much smaller being than the gallant hero who undertook a sacred quest for his beloved, regarding himself in the final moment “as a creature driven and derided by vanity.”

In recounting the boy’s journey from passionate innocence to jaded cynicism, Joyce employs a narrative technique that is subtle but effective. The story is told from a first-person retrospective point of view that enables us to perceive two distinct but intimately related voices in the narration: that of the devoted young boy able to imagine himself a knight-errant “in places the most hostile to romance” and that of the subdued older man, recalling his younger self with an ironic detachment born of disappointment. The narration brings us inside the mind of the youthful lover, perplexed and overwhelmed by emotions that he can interpret only in the languages he knows: that of religious devotion and the stories of adventure and romance. Throughout, though, we are reminded that the young boy’s “confused adoration” is being recalled by his older and sadly unconfused self. The gloomy opening description of North Richmond Street, with its houses “conscious of decent lives within them,” gazing at each other “with brown imperturbable faces,” clearly reflects the perspective of the older man rather than that of the boy who careened through the same street in play. And the explicit judgment in the narrator’s recollection that “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood ” (emphasis mine) reflects an ironic self-perception that the young boy does not at that moment have. These two voices eventually converge in “Araby” ’s closing paragraph, when the narrator declares, “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” revealing the origin of that ironic perspective in the moment of his sad fall from romance to cynicism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin USA, 1996.

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Literary Analysis of 'Araby' by James Joyce

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Words: 625 |

Published: Apr 11, 2022

Words: 625 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Joyce, James. “Araby.” Literary Cavalcade, vol. 52, no. 6, Mar. 2000, p. 21. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.macewan.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=2813357&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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