Light and Dark Symbolism Illustrated in Joyce's Araby Essay

The unwanting desire to face reality and confront the isolation in which one is living is a struggle that both Gabriel and a little boy encounter. Jame Joyce’s works portray his characters to display both inner struggles and difficulty being socially accepted. During the party, Gabriel is anxious and nervous because he wants to uphold this reputation of a confident man. Therefore, he creates a script allowing him to have a sense control and comfort which he lacks. In Contrast, the little boy perceives himself to be self-assured and sociable when in reality these ideas are inflicted by his imagination. James Joyce’s “The Dead” and “Araby” features characters who struggle with internal emotions, revealing their alienation, separation with

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.

The interplay of dark and light motifs underlies the narrator’s most recent hardship. On his way home on the subway, the narrator comes across his brother’s name in a newspaper and “stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin). Riding in the light of the subway car, the author makes the non-suspecting narrator subject to suffering, unguarded by the protective cloak of the outside darkness. Made vulnerable by the exposed light and people surrounding him, the narrator is hit harder by the unexpected news than if he had read it in the darkness of his private room. Under the “swinging lights,” the narrator is not prepared to cope with the troubling news. This emphasizes the importance of light as a symbol for one’s need of camouflage to properly cope with tragedy.

“I stared at it in the swinging lights of the subway car, and in the faces and bodies of the people, and in my own face, trapped in the darkness which roared outside” (Baldwin 564). The immediate introduction of light and dark is introduced by Baldwin in the story to illustrate the contrast in the brother’s estranged relationship here. The narrator has been hopeful, possibly even submissive and avoiding, of his brother Sonny’s current condition and whereabouts. His hope and

darkness” he experienced with his eyes and he always was in fear. He is sharing his own

James Joyce, the author of both “Araby” and “The Dead,” exploits a sense of imagery throughout both short stories. “Araby” and “The Dead” both share and differ from each other in the ways the imagery is shown. The vivid imagery in “Araby” is applied to express feelings and expressions from one character to another. The main character, an unnamed boy, has an undying admiration for Mangan’s sister. James Joyce describes the boy’s obsession with Mangan’s sister in vast imagery. “The Dead” also includes many senses of imagery, but shows kinesthetic imagery rather than vivid imagery. Kinesthetic imagery is an imagery that is portrayed through the movement and physical tension. In “The Dead,” Gabriel, the main character, dislikes the country of Ireland he lives in, so he flees. Throughout this, Gabriel describes how Ireland is boring and cold, displaying kinesthetic imagery. “The Dead” and “Araby” both include vivid imagery, kinesthetic imagery, and auditory imagery.

     There are many dark and light images throughout the story. The dark imagery seems to speak for itself. It has a joyless, gloomy, sad, and obviously devoid of light type of message, to it. Even the tone of the story has this kind of impression. However, this is exactly how the boy describes the aura of the neighborhood. The majority of the objects, people, and places are described through darkness. For example, the houses are illustrated as having “brown imperturbable faces”, meaning that there are traces of darkness both

In “Araby” the darkness relates to the narrator’s life and his religious upbringing. The story starts out in “The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street

In “Araby”, James Joyce uses imagery to allow the reader to better comprehend the story. In the beginning of the story, the boy is seen playing with his friends, a seemingly happy time to most, but in his town “dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners”(2), and their play took them “through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses”(2) The imagery of the darkness and dirty streets shows how dull life was for the boy and his friends. They did the same thing every day, playing in the same gloomy streets, and going back to the same dreary houses in the evening. This allows the reader to understand how exciting it was when the boy got to see Mangan’s sister on the doorstep.

The idea of light and darkness has often been used throughout many novels to convey a sense of hope or a sense of hopelessness within a character or within a setting which is often created through vivid imagery. The author James Joyce uses imagery through the portrayal of light within the short fictional story "Araby" to display the hope of the main character through religious allusions. The light portrays the amount of hope the boy has throughout the story by starting off with an incredibly vibrant light and ending with the darkness taking over his vision, which suggests that all hope has been lost.

“Gazing into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Araby is a short story centering on an Irish adolescence boy emerging from boyhood fanaticizing into the harsh realities of everyday life in his country. It undergoes through the phases of self-discovery through a coming of age. It takes place in Dublin in 1894 when it was under British rule. The boy in the story is strongly correlated with the author James Joyce. Young Goodman Brown was another story in which the ending results on a grand epiphany. It was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, taking place in Salem during the era of the Witch trials, who was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts and had a major impact on the stories that he establishes in Young Goodman Brown. Young Goodman Brown was a story set in the 17th century in Salem in which 20 innocent men and women were accused and executed on the notion they were involved in witchcraft, it is based on a village of Puritans. It bases the root of the story of the temptations of the devil and corruption of the good to evil by entering a forest which represents evilness and the corruption of a good man’s intentions. Between the two short stories, Araby and Young Goodman Brown, the endings consist of grand epiphanies. With every great epiphany that takes place a lesson is learned, people are drawn into another state of mind, and then they are changed either for better or

The narrator's desire for light is caused by the fact that the light illuminates "the blackness of [his] invisibility." He lives in a secluded basement and "tapped into a power line" in order to receive electricity. The narrator realized that the light makes him less invisible to himself. He was chased into the darkness because of people's inability to see him, deeming him invisible. However, the light always him to see himself and be aware of his on existence. The light shows him what other people fail to see; it brings him out of the darkness that he is trapped in.

James Joyce uses symbolism in "Araby" to highlight the environment and characters that he is surrounded with. The author also uses symbolism to allow the reader to understand crucial factors that affected Bublin in previous years. Religious is a prominent symbol through out the short story. The boy states “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free"(15). This tells the reader that the Christian boys are 'set free' when they are having fun on the streets and playing with their friends. The boys are temporarily set free from the control of the Church and their parents. However, the street is usually blind, meaning it is dull and silent because the boys are in

perception of his life. The narrator’s epiphany is more tragic than it is good, for it sanctions him to realize that his infatuation with Mangan’s sister is just a distant aspiration for an alternate reality. The epiphany did, in a way, aid the protagonist as it helps him begin his journey at the crossroads of life at the end. The impact of the epiphany is mainly influenced by the dull and menial lifestyle that the narrator is seemingly subjugated to. The narrator develops a desire for his neighbour, increasingly deluding the narrator from his monotonous life. In a way to court Mangan’s sister, the narrator sets off to

how much would I. As much as a conception of a two-month venture to be