Araby

“Araby” by James Joyce is about an adolescent boy and his naive admiration for his friends sister. The short story recants his blind devotion for her, even though he seldom interacted with the older girl. She is always in his thoughts, though rarely do they converse. In a passing conversation with the girl, she mentions the Araby, a bazaar in town. He ventures to the bazaar, believing it would be magical. When he gets there, he is upset by the dismal turnout. It does not even slightly compare to what he imagined it would be. The short story ends with the lights going out in the bazaar. This is a parallel to his admiration for the girl. He understands that in his mind he created her to be something greater than she was, just like the bazaar.

The narrator was incapable of understanding how much devotion he had for the girl. He was powerless to her. She owned his thoughts, and his desires. The setting was dark and gloomy. Through his descriptive writing, the reader could feel the gloom and even the obscurity of the environment of story. Through this, the author was paralleling the setting, to the darkness inside the main character. His love for the girl he barely knew was dark. There was no hope for his love to flourish because it was not founded on reality but was founded on whimsy. He allowed himself to be controlled and even manipulated by his own imagination. This was not a story of affection, but a story of power. He let his own thoughts control him, for a girl he did not know. This story displayed the power ones own thoughts have, even over reality. They cause obscurity rather than clarity. The reader was able to see, at the end of the story, how reality still tangible even in the headspace of delusion. When the lights go out in the bazaar, the narrator becomes aware of how something he thought would be so incredible, could be so disappointing. This is paralleled to his fantasy of the girl. He was liberated with this knowledge, but also became aware of how he had been trapped, and