Araby

James Joyce’s short fiction, “Araby”, speaks of the loss of innocence when one enters adulthood. The narrator of “Araby” reflects back to his childhood and the defining moment when he reached clarity on the world he stood before. The young boy, living in a world lifeless and religious influence, becomes consumed with the lust of a neighbouring girl. The girl, Mangan, is symbolically the narrator’s childhood obsession with growing up. As she resembles the desire to become an adult, the Araby is the enchanted vision of adulthood. By the end of the short story, he realizes the bareness of everyday life. In fact, the disappointment that is Araby awakens the boy to the fact that his immature dreams have blinded him to the cold and stagnant

In "Araby" by James Joyce, the narrator uses vivid imagery in order to express feelings and situations. The story evolves around a boy's adoration of a girl he refers to as "Mangan's sister" and his promise to her that he shall buy her a present if he goes to the Araby bazaar. Joyce uses visual images of darkness and light as well as the exotic in order to suggest how the boy narrator attempts to achieve the inaccessible. Accordingly, Joyce is expressing the theme of the boys exaggerated desire through the images which are exotic. The theme of "Araby" is a boy's desire to what he cannot achieve.

Lust is having a self-indulgent sexual desire. Susan Minot portrayed the mind of a promiscuous high school female perfectly. Lust is powerful and seductive, but it's inherently selfish and opposed to love. For many girls who are having sex with different boys they can identify with the desire to be needed. The characters in "Lust" are written in a way to highlight the dysfunction and disconnection of everyone involved. The narrator herself is nameless and faceless, making the reader believe that she has already somehow disappeared, just as the men in her life have made her disappear after having sex. Similarly, the men are listed in a brief and are identified only by their sexual acts or by other, easily objectified characteristics. What

The narrator “Araby”, an unnamed young Irish boy, living with his aunt and uncle on North Richmond Street, residing in a house once occupied by a now-dead priest. The narrator, an orphan, spends his days attending school, spending time with his friend Mangan, and pining after Mangan’s sister. The narrator lives a relatively normal live, although he gradually becomes more consumed with the idea of Mangan’s sister, “I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play” (Joyce, 124. The narrator idealizes Mangan’s sister, barely speaking to her, yet he

With religion being a very prominent factor in the lives of the characters in this story, the narrator neglects to realize that this factor will make it nearly impossible for them to be together. With the inability to realize this, mixed with his teenage hormones, this causes him to be engulfed by his objectification of Manegen’s sister. “My body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running along the wires” (Joyce, 217). He allows her to control him so heavily; simply by the way she moves or speaks, he doesn’t allow himself to live his own life as the person he truly is. By not allowing himself to see anything else past this girl he is idealizing, he shuts himself off from the rest of the things in his life, the more important things, such as work and school.

The plot in “A&P” begins when the three girls who walk into the grocery store wearing their bathing suits. The conflict of the plot is the the girls who walked into the grocery store wearing nothing but their bathing suits. In this time period it was socially unacceptable for girls to walk around showing a lot of skin. The manager, Lengel confronted the girls for dressing inappropriately and because of this Sammy quits his job right after Lengle confronted the girls. Sammy removed his apron and bow tie and walked out of the store. When Sammy gets outside he expects the girls to be waiting for him but they are gone. The plot in “Araby” starts by the narrator telling the readers how he is obsessed with Mangan’s sister. He says “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 leaped” (Joyce 331). Mangan's sister tells the narrator about the Araby. She tells him that she wants to go but cannot. The narrator decides that he is going to go to the Araby to get his crush a gift. When he gets there most of the stalls are closed and he does not have enough money to buy her anything so he comes home with nothing. The

Due to his strong love for her, the narrator wanted to make her happy and he believed buying her a gift would make her happy. He put a lot of pressure on him going to the Bazaar and buying her a gift. He associated him buying her a gift with him being with her. They both took encounters they had with the girls they loved and made them more than they actually were.

In the opening paragraphs of James Joyce's short story, "Araby," the setting takes center stage to the narrator. Joyce tends carefully to the exquisite detail of personifying his setting, so that the narrator's emotions may be enhanced. To create a genuine sense of mood, and reality, Joyce uses many techniques such as first person narration, style of prose, imagery, and most of all setting. The setting of a short story is vital to the development of character.

In her story, "Araby," James Joyce concentrates on character rather than on plot to reveal the ironies inherent in self-deception. On one level "Araby" is a story of initiation, of a boy’s quest for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in an inner awareness and a first step into manhood. On another level the story consists of a grown man's remembered experience, for the story is told in retrospect by a man who looks back to a particular moment of intense meaning and insight. As such, the boy's experience is not restricted to youth's encounter with first love. Rather, it is a portrayal of a continuing problem all through life: the incompatibility of the ideal, of the dream

“Araby,” is a story of emotional passion carefully articulated by the author, James Joyce, to mark the end of childhood and the start of adolescence. It is told from the perspective of a young boy who is filled with lust for his friend, Mangan’s, sister. He lives in a cheerless town on a street hosting simply complacent families who own brown faced houses that stare vacantly into one another. The boy temporarily detaches himself from this gloomy atmosphere and dwells on the keeper of his affection. Only when he journeys to a festival titled Araby, does he realize that his attempt at winning the heart of Mangan’s sister has been done in an act of vanity. Joyce takes advantage of literary elements such as diction and imagery to convey an at times dreary and foolishly optimistic tone.

He idealizes Mangan’s sister, and portrays her as his only source of light in his bleak world. The boy describes his street as having “dark muddy lanes behind the houses…dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits” and the rooms of his house “musty from having been enclosed too long”. These depictions demonstrate how repressed he feels regarding his lifeless surroundings. Meanwhile, illustrations of Mangan’s sister are associated with light and ease, “her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door” or “the light from the lamp…lit up her hair”. The boy clings on to the image of the girl and intoxicates himself with emotions of delight and exhilaration. This drives him to embark on the journey to the bazaar, along with high expectations of exotic surroundings. However, he is met with heavy disappointment - a train that drops him at an “improvised wooden platform” and a “silence like that which pervades a church after a service”. He comes to an epiphany – Mangan’s sister was only an arrogant wish for change and she would only fail his expectations as well, his infatuation was as misleading as his fantasies about the

In Araby, the boy is younger than his playmates sister. Joyce does not give us any ages of the characters but we can assume because the main character goes outside and plays games with his friends still. Additionally, through his actions we can tell that he is starting to hit puberty. Normally when boys are young kids, all they tend to care about is having fun and wrecking havoc. In Araby however, the boy is starting to have an attraction feeling for his friends sister. Thus, hinting to the reader that the boy is hitting his puberty stage.

Despite these discouraging surroundings, the boy is determined to find some evidence of the loveliness his idealistic dreams tell him should exist within the Church. His first love becomes the focal point of this determination. In the person of Mangan's sister, obviously somewhat older than the boy and his companions, his longings find an object of worship. The boy's feelings for the girl are a confused mixture of sexual desire and of sacred adoration, as

     Even under the best of circumstances the transition from childhood into adulthood is a long and dreary journey that all young men must encounter in life. A road that involves many hardships and sacrifices along the way; and when that road is a lonely one, with only oneself to rely upon, the hardship intensifies to become destructive to those involved. This is particularly true in the story “Araby,” where James Joyce portrays the trials and tribulations of a young boy’s initiation into adulthood. Many of the boy’s problems lie in not being able to come to grips with the harsh reality that no matter how much he

"Araby" tells the story of an adolescent boy's initiation into adulthood. The story is narrated by a mature man reflecting upon his adolescence and the events that forced him to face the disillusioning realities of adulthood. The minor charac­ters play a pivotal role in this initiation process. The boy observes the hypocrisy of adults in the priest and Mrs. Mercer; and his vain, self-centered uncle introduces him to another disillusioning aspect of adulthood. The boy's infatuation with the girl ultimately ends in disillusion­ment, and Joyce uses the specific example of the boy's disillusionment with love as a metaphor for disillusionment with life itself. From the beginning, the boy