Araby Analysis Essay

The short story “Araby” was written by James Joyce and published as the last story in his collection of short stories entitled “Dubliners,” which concludes Joyce’s take on childhood adolescence (Barry). The story opens to the description of North Richmond Street in Dublin, Ireland, the narrator’s home. The narrator is a young, Catholic, Irish, boy that possess an infatuation of his school friends older sister. After a short conversation with his friend’s sister about the bazaar named “Araby” that is coming to town, he decides to win her affection by going to the fair and bringing her back a trinket. When he finally arrives at the bazaar, it is so late that the fair’s shops are closed or are in the process of closing. While standing

In “Araby” Joyce uses elements of fiction such as character, setting, imagery, and shifts, to reveal the authors theme of exploration of relationships and one’s self. In the story the characters help explain the theme by being the centers of the story, The only characters names the reader learns are Mangan, the school friend whose sister is the subject of the narrators lust, and Ms. Mercer. Mangan is cleverly named after an Irish poet who specifically wrote poems about sentiment and romance during the 19th century. Joyce uses Mangan’s name to subtly show that the narrator truly believes he feels a love for his friend’s sister (Stone). Since the story is being from the boy’s point of view, we know how the narrator truly feels about himself and the other characters. In the beginning, the narrator sees himself just as an invisible Irish boy but, by

The marketplace scene in “Araby” offers vivid metonymies for the boys’ world (Murphy). He describes the scene with phrases such as being “jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys.” The setting of the story provides much for the imagery. The narrator describes the sky in the beginning of the story as “ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns” (Joyce 169). The street the narrator lives on is described as blind and a “quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free,” which, again, shows how dull the neighborhood is. Joyce uses the monotonous imagery to not only show the lack of excitement in the narrators’ town but to also show it in the narrator’s relationships. There is not any excitement in the narrators family or friends lives and that causes the narrator to see everything through a dismal lens. Without the dreary imagery in “Araby” the theme would not easily understood for the