Araby And A & P Literary Analysis

Throughout poetry, drama, and fiction, there exist themes and symbols that give readers a dose of reality and human experience. People read literature and end up learning new facts about themselves that they never knew before. This usually happens when the reader is reading literature that they can relate to. An example of this is coming of age stories.

When adolescents read these stories, they realize that they share the feelings of the characters and have even had similar experiences. In these stories, the main character is trying to figure out who they are in the eyes of other people. But what they do not know is that they must discover their own identity before other people decide who they are. Two stories that make use of this theme are Araby by James Joyce and A & P by John Updike. Both of these stories feature characters that are coming to terms with their fantasies and realities, and this relates to readers because it deals with the idea of people wanting what they cannot have.

In A & P, the narrator, Sammy, observes three young girls, dressed only in bathing suits, who enter the supermarket in which he works. Sammy notices these girls immediately and takes note of every detail of their being. He especially pays attention to the leader of the girls, whom he calls “Queenie” (Updike 33). Queenie and her friends enter the supermarket believing they are “decent” (Updike 35). Every customer in the store watches them, and they enjoy the attention they are receiving. The act of entering the store in only bathing suits shows that the girls are both confident and innocent. They do not know that they are dressed inappropriately, and they are clearly comfortable enough with themselves to walk in wearing bikinis. ...

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... Queenie was innocent of the fact that she was dressed inappropriately. She entered the store in a bikini because she was confident of herself, not because she was rebelling against the rules of the store. Sammy’s thoughts of Queenie were merely an illusion.

The narrator from Araby is different. He does not have a specific vision for his life, but rather a desire for change. His life in Dublin lacks in excitement, and compensates for this by obsessing over Mangan’s sister. He desires fulfillment and satisfaction from change even though he is uncertain of what change will bring. He thinks change will bring adventure and exhilaration, but he learns at the bazaar that it is nothing more than accents and vases. Both of these stories can relate to readers because they both deal with the idea of wanting what we cannot have.

Fantasy is very different from reality.