Analysis Of James Joyce's Araby: Love Is A Facade

Cole Yang

Stafford Pd.1

AP English Lit- Research Paper

8 September 2015

Love is a Facade In “Araby”, James Joyce details the transition of a young Irish boy into his adolescence. Looking for love and excitement, the narrator becomes obsessed with pleasing his best friend’s sister, eventually ending up at a special festival to buy her a present. Disappointed by the bad- natured shopkeepers and its closing down, he reaches a frustrating epiphany about the fine line between reality and his wistful dreams. Through the use of fanciful imagery and detached characterization, Joyce demonstrates how romance belongs to the realm of the young, not the old, and that it is doomed to fail in a word flawed by materialism and a lack of beauty. Through

It is this last line of the short story that symbolizes the narrator coming to terms with his prior disillusionment. On the way to bazaar, he had envisioned himself as a knight in shining armor, embarking on a noble quest to secure a beautiful present for his beloved. However, his experiences after that destroy his dreams. As he takes his first baby steps towards adulthood, he finally takes the world at face value. Ironically, he pays a heavy price for this realization: his vibrant imagination. He can no longer tease magic from the mundane actions of others, or his boring neighborhood houses. All the magic that he had created as a little boy disappeared in an instant. In a sense, being one step closer to adulthood actually prevents him from growing in many other ways. In “Blind streets and seeing houses: Araby’s dim glass revisited” by Margot Norris, she mentions how, “North Richmond Street is introduced as blind, mute, with emptiness inside – a proleptic figure of the boy at the end of the story” (Norris 1). She ties the story back full-circle by comparing all the

The narrator cannot stop himself from fantasizing about her perfections, such as when “the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing” (Joyce 2). Through his constant thoughts about Mangan’s sister and her physical beauty, the narrator reveals an intricate piece of his innate desires. It isn’t exactly Mangan’s sister that continually captivates his heart, but his idea of her and her greater embodiment of love. Ironically, despite the fact that she is the source of all the action that takes place in “Araby”, the narrator reveals very little about her. In “Exhibition and Inhibition: The Body Scene in Dubliners”, Sheila Conboy wrote, “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” (Conboy 4). 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