Araby | Araby

In his short story "Araby", James Joyce portrays a character who strives to achieve a goal and who comes to an epiphany through his failure to accomplish that goal. Written in the first person, "Araby" is about a man recalling an event from his childhood. The narrator's desire to be with the sister of his friend Mangan, leads him on a quest to bring back a gift from the carnival for the girl. It is the quest, the desire to be a knight in shining armor, that sends the narrator to the carnival and it's what he experienced and sees at the carnival that brings him to the realization that some dreams are just not attainable.

Joyce uses the setting of the story to help create a mood and to develop characters and themes throughout the story. "An uninhibited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground." Joyce uses these words: uninhibited, blind and detached not only to describe the narrator's house, but also to describe the narrator himself. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, not his parents. He lives on a dead end street of a lower class neighborhood. And he is hopelessly in love with his friend's sister. The reader can infer right from the beginning that the narrator is not content with his life.

The blind love that the narrator feels for Mangan's sister leads him to watch her from his window. On one "dark, rainy evening" he watches her and realizes that he can "see so little." Joyce uses this blurriness and lack of vision to represent how unable the narrator is to recognize his distorted view of reality. Even when the narrator is walking through the market with his aunt, walking by such unromantic things as "drunken men and bargaining women" and "barrels of pig's cheeks", he still daydreams about his friend's sister. "Her image accompanied me even in the places most hostile to romance." The narrator's everyday activities were also interrupted by is romantic feelings for his friend's sister. "Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlor watching her door...At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read." This shows the extent to which the narrator desires to be with Mangan's sister.

During the narrator's first encounter with Mangan's sister, she "turned a sliver bracelet around her wrist." Picturing this bracelet twisting and spinning around the girl's wrist gives the reader a sense that the narrator's emotions too are spinning round and round as he is finally talking to the girl of his dreams. He describes her " silver bracelet", "the white curve of her neck", and the "white border of a petticoat" to give Mangan's sister a sense of innocence and purity.

"If I go, I said, I will bring something for you." This is where the narrator's romantic quest begins. He has committed himself to going to Araby, an exotic carnival of wonder and enchantment, to bring back a gift for the girl he is in love with. What seems to be a simple task: go to the carnival, get a gift and bring it back; turns out to be one upset after another. The day of the carnival the narrator's uncle, who has the narrator's money, arrives home late. In his drunken state, the uncle hands the narrator the money and sends him on his way. "I took my seat in a third class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay, the train moved out of the station slowly." Joyce goes on to describe "ruinous houses." This dark and gloomy train ride is used as foreshadowing. It seems as though the narrator is being set up for a fall.

The narrator's time and money begin to run short as he approaches his final destination. Finding no cheap entrance and with little time to spare, the narrator hurries though the full-price entrance. Finding himself alone in the darkness of the evening and with most of the stalls of the carnival closed, the narrator makes his way to one of the open stalls. He examines various vases and teacups, searching for the right gift to bring back to his love. When a young lady asks the narrator if he wishes to buy something, "the tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seems to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty." This causes the narrator to feel that the high-class workers at the carnival are looking down on him. He finally realizes his self-deception when the lights go out and his vision of the entire situation becomes perfectly clear. "Gazing into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Ironic that in the darkness of the night the narrator can see his life clearly for the first time. Finally the narrator realizes that a relationship with Mangan's sister is unattainable and that his quest for a gift was only a waste of time, money and effort. Defeated by himself, as well as society, he understands that all the internal and external forces aligned against him are too strong to overcome.

Although the narrator fails in his quest of bringing back a gift for Mangan's sister and realizes that a relationship with the girl he is in love with will never happen, he has increased his knowledge about himself, his place and role in society, and about life in general. He develops an awareness that he must start setting his priorities straight and creating realistic goals for himself.