Araby

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"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners.

Plot

The unnamed protagonist in "Araby" is a boy who is just beginning to come into his sexual identity. Through his first-person narration, we are immersed at the start of the story in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street, which seems to be illuminated only by the verve and imagination of the children who, despite the growing darkness that comes during the winter months, insist on playing "until [their] bodies glowed." Even though the conditions of this neighbourhood leave much to be desired, the children’s play is infused with their almost magical way of perceiving the world, which the narrator dutifully conveys to the reader:

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But though these boys "career" around the neighbourhood in a very childlike way, they are also aware of and interested in the adult world, as represented by their spying on the narrator’s uncle as he comes home from work and, more importantly, on Mangan’s sister, whose dress “swung as she moved” and whose “soft rope of hair tossed from side to side.” These boys are on the brink of sexual awareness and, awed by the mystery of the opposite sex, are hungry for knowledge.

On one rainy evening, the boy secludes himself in a soundless, dark drawing-room and gives his feelings for her full release: "I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times." This scene is the culmination of the narrator’s increasingly romantic idealization of Mangan’s sister. By the time he actually speaks to her, he has built up such an unrealistic idea of her that he can barely put sentences together: “When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me if I was going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no.” But the narrator recovers splendidly: when Mangan’s sister dolefully states that she will not be able to go to Araby, he gallantly offers to bring something back for her.

The narrator now cannot wait to go to the Araby bazaar and procure for his beloved some grand gift that will endear him to her. And though his aunt frets, hoping that it is not “some Freemason affair,” and though his uncle, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps stingy, arrives so late from work and equivocates so much that he almost keeps the narrator from being able to go, the intrepid narrator heads out of the house, tightly clenching a florin, in spite of the late hour, toward the bazaar.

But the Araby market turns out not to be the most fantastic place he had hoped it would be. It is late; most of the stalls are closed. The only sound is "the fall of coins" as men count their money. Worst of all, however, is the vision of sexuality -- of his future -- that he receives when he stops at one of the few remaining open stalls. The young woman minding the stall is engaged in a conversation with two young men. Though he is potentially a customer, she only grudgingly and briefly waits on him before returning to her frivolous conversation. His idealized vision of Araby is destroyed, along with his idealized vision of Mangan’s sister: and of love. With shame and anger rising within him, he exits the bazaar.

Characters

As this story uses a first person limited narration, the most complex and developed character in the story is the narrator. The narrator faces two distinct challenges in "Araby": the challenge of growing into manhood and the challenge of growing intellectually and emotionally in an environment so poisonous to the imagination that it all but guarantees a life of drudgery. The one informs the other; the destruction of the narrator’s dreams at the end of Araby come precisely from the disillusionment he experiences when he goes to the bazaar. The narrator's dreams are heroic ones, romantic ones; he goes on a quest, one not so different from those knights embarked upon in the name of Ideal Love, to procure a gift worthy of his Beloved. When he fails in his quest, he sees the world for what it is, and thus takes his first steps into adulthood. Ironically, it is at this moment when he enters the adult world that we can expect his growth in many ways to cease. Before, when he was simply a boy playing with other boys, he was able to tease magic from the mundane actions of others and the monochrome environs of North Richmond Street; now that he has seen the Araby market for what it really is, the magic he once perceived is gone.

Other characters in the story serve mostly as catalysts, foils, and filters for the narrator’s feelings and observations. The ironically-presented priest, dead before the start of the story, is dead for a reason: religion is portrayed not only as moribund, but as life-draining and hypocritical. The narrator’s aunt and uncle act as his surrogate parents, and their presence in the story raises the ominous question “What happened to his parents?” Furthermore, they are representatives of the adult world, and it is fair to say that, though they work hard and perhaps mean well, they provide little for the narrator to look forward to as he grows into a man. Certainly the female shopkeeper and her two male companions, by bringing the narrator to his unwelcome realization, play an important, if small, part in the drama of the story.

But by far the most important minor character in the story is Mangan’s sister, as she gives rise to all of the major action in the story. Although she inspires the story’s action, the reader learns almost nothing about her. Her hair is like soft rope, her dress moves when she walks, she owns a silver bracelet and she cannot go to Araby because her convent has a retreat that conflicts with it; little more is revealed. If we can be reasonably sure that we know what the narrator knows, we can conclude that it is not so much Mangan’s sister as an actual person that captivates the narrator, but his idea of her, and by extension of Love. As Sheila Conboy writes in her article "Exhibition and Inhibition: The Body Scene in Dubliners," "While the boy narrates the process of his sexual awakening, the girl remains anonymous, merely the petticoated object of his desire, never given a voice to express a desire of her own." Because the narrator treats Mangan’s sister as only an object of desire -- as opposed to a person capable of desires -- reality is destined to disappoint him. Through Mangan’s sister, we come to understand that the narrator at the end of the story is not only distraught because his idea of love has been dashed, but ashamed that he could have been so foolish and childish to believe in it in the first place. Though his view of the world may henceforth be less romantic, it might be fairer to women. Interpreted as such, the “quest” is not fruitless, because it helps the narrator come to self-knowledge. Jerome Mandel states in his essay "The Structure of 'Araby',": “the quest is successful because it leads to vision and epiphany: coming to some understanding of oneself."

Setting

The details of Araby are immensely important in setting the mood; dreary, dark Dublin is the living, symbolic backdrop for the story.^{[citation needed]} The gloomy atmosphere of North Richmond street that actually sets the scene at the start of the story is an anticipation of what lies ahead for the little boy in the bazaar of Araby. The first sentence of the story lets us know that North Richmond street is "blind," and that the Christian Brothers’ School (O'Connells CBS) did not so much dismiss students for the day as "set them free." A quick scan of the important adjectives in the first paragraph -- "blind," "quiet," "uninhabited," "detached," "square," "decent," "brown," "imperturbable" -- quickly presents a world that is practical, simple, and unmitigatingly stultifying. As mentioned before, the boys who play in the neighbourhood are able, somehow, to discover some beauty and wander even from these simple surroundings, but to do so they must become connoisseurs of darkness: the lanterns on North Richmond are "feeble," the lanes are "dark" and "muddy," the houses “sombre” in the winter twilight, the "dark dripping gardens" redolent with the smell coming from their “ashpits.” This description of the street and the lives the boys live on it serve as the backdrop that we will use to understand how much more imaginative the Araby market will or will not be.^{[citation needed]}

Of course, the story’s greatest irony is just how misnamed the Araby market is. It is certainly not a wondrous evocation of the West’s idealized and romanticized notions of the Middle East. Rather, it is exactly the sort of disappointing market you would expect to appear in the Dublin Joyce describes. It is dark, mostly empty, hushed, and more focused on money than anything else. The market at the end of the story, by closer resembling the rest of his life than the image of it he had conjured in his daydreams, forces the narrator to a bleak realization: the stark realities of day-to-day living have little to do with the ideals we carry in our heads.^{[citation needed]}

Themes

For such a short story, Araby touches on a great number of themes: coming of age; the loss of innocence; the life of the mind versus poverty, both physical and intellectual; the dangers of idealization; the decreasing significance of the church, despite the preservation of empty ceremonies; and the pain that often comes when one encounters love in reality instead of its elevated form. These themes build on one another entirely through the thoughts of the young boy who serves as narrator.

Romantic elements

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Araby

Araby contains many themes and traits common to Joyce in general and Dubliners in particular. As with many of the stories in the collection, Araby involves a character going on a journey, the end result of which is fruitless, and ends with the character going back to where he came from. Eveline is just one other story in Dubliners to feature a circular journey in this manner. Also, the narrator lives with his aunt and uncle, although his uncle appears to be a portrait of Joyce's father, and may be seen as a prototype for Stephen Dedalus of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The scorn the narrator has for his uncle is certainly consistent with the scorn Joyce showed for his father, and the lack of "good" parents is pertinent.^{[citation needed]}

Media adaptations

• In 2000, Araby an award-winning short film adaptation of "Araby" was produced and directed by Dennis Courtney.

Footnotes

References

• Joyce, James. Dubliners (London: Grant Richards, 1914)
• Conboy, Sheila C. “Exhibition and Inhibition: The Body Scene in Dubliners.” Twentieth Century Literature. 37.4 (Winter 1991): 405-419. JSTOR. Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, NY. March 4, 2007. <http://www.jstor.org>
• French, Marilyn. “Missing Pieces in Joyce’s Dubliners. Twentieth Century Literature. 1.24 (Winter 1978): 443-472. JSTOR. Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, NY. March 3, 2007. <http://www.jstor.org>
• Mandel, Jerome. “The Structure of ‘Araby.’” Modern Language Studies. 15.4 (Autumn 1985): 48-54. JSTOR. Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York, NY. March 4, 2007. <http://www.jstor.org>
• Zoe Marduel. "Araby"

External links

• Summary and Analysis of Araby at GradeSaver