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Araby Theme

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“Araby” - the title suggest the exotic and far-away, the romantic, and that’s what this story is about – a boy’s first experience with romance. Who hasn’t had the exquisite but excruciating experience of a first crush. And in my case, like the boy’s, it was on a friend’s sister, although mine was a couple of years older. Manghan’s sister appears to the boy like an angel, with her hair back lighted almost like a halo. But in reality she is just the girl across the street in a lower middle class neighborhood – a dead-end street that suggests nobody there is going anywhere. He admires her longingly from behind a window shade across the street, just as I longingly stared at Linda, who, if she even had known I was alive, probably would have laughed at the glasses-wearing, book-wormish nerd that I was. Just as “her image accompanied [the boy] in places most hostile to romance,” so did Linda’s image accompany me – in the pew at early church service and in the back seat of my parents’ car as we drove farther and farther away from my her on a vacation trip to Georgia. …show more content…

Never having been there before, he doesn’t know what to expect. But the very fact of it’s being important to her gives it a romantic, even magical meaning for him. It becomes his quest to go there and bring her back some token – something meaningful, almost like a religious relic in their Roman Catholic culture. The best I could have hoped for to even get Linda’s attention and have her speak to me was a clever remark or turn of phrase. But that never happened. For the boy, “ her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” The same for me: I even carved her initials into a tree.

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