Metaphors In Araby

The use of religious metaphors in James Joyce’s “Araby” is significant because each of them reflects the narrator’s naive, idealized perspective on love and they emphasize his inexperience with feelings of affection. His infatuation is detailed in visual, physical, aural, and emotional metaphors that involve biblical allusions; many of which focus on the aspect of worship in religion. Similarly to a religious figure, the narrator describes his obsession in terms of adoration, and this contributes to his innocent characterization because he is unable to explain his feelings for without turning to hyperbolic figures of speech that he has had previous exposure to as a result of religious experiences. When the narrator first introduces his crush,

The implied comparison in this particular simile is important because it is a discernible moment in which the narrator realizes that his desire to fulfill his promise, much like the sounds of his surroundings, has dwindled down. This means that there is a direct relationship that exists between the narrator’s idealized image and the aural stimulation by which he is affected. What I mean by this is that the narrator is able to focus on his affectionate thoughts better in silence than in instances where he is surrounded by noise. Earlier, when the narrator was much more enamored by Mangan’s sister, there are numerous sounds that distract him from focusing his attention towards her; sounds which Brugaletta describes as a “cacophony” (14). However, when he makes the resemblance of the silence of the bazaar to the calm that follows a mass, he emphasizes that this is a climactic point of transition in which he comes to realize the foolish nature of his attachment. Without the invasive “shrill-litanies of shop-boys” (Joyce 2) or the “nasal chanting of street-singers” (Joyce 2) to divert the narrator’s attention away from his journey, he realizes that the image of Mangan’s sister he spent so much time and effort on idealizing, much like the sounds around him, “fade away” (Brugaletta 17). Once more the narrator relates his experience to that of religion; and with the quiet, he is left alone with this moment of self-realization. Arguably, this is what occurs at the end of every mass, because members of a congregation generally end up with some sense of enlightenment, and often stay after a church service to collect their thoughts in