Araby Quest Structure Analysis

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Araby and the Quest Structure James Joyce’s Araby focuses on a boy who lives with his aunt and uncle in Dublin that was formerly occupied by a now deceased priest. He falls in love with the sister of his friend, Mangan; and one day, she asks him if he is going to the bazaar called Araby. This bazaar has been advertised as something exotic, luxurious. When Mangan’s sister states that she will not attend due to religious activities, the boy promises to bring her back a gift instead. The immense excitement from their conversation makes the boy lose concentration on his studies and skip out on playing his friends. This long wait becomes agonizing as he waits for his uncle to come home, only to find that he’s drunk and wasted most of his money …show more content…

“Heroes, having made adjustment to the special world, now go on to seek its heart. They pass into an intermediate region between the border and the very center of the hero’s journey.” (Vogler, 145) This is where the main character meets new Threshold Guardians, and struggles. This is the final training for the main trial for the hero. Most of the building was dark except for a few places where booths were still placed up. The boy was finally in the inmost cave of his journey. Convincing his family to let him go, waiting for his drunk uncle to come home late, finally reaching his destination after a slow train ride, finding the entrance- He went through tough challenges to reach where he is standing right now, “Remembering with difficulty why I had come I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea- sets.” (Joyce, 45) He hears two gentlemen arguing with an uncaring lady, his time wasting away as he pretends to be interested in her junk. His great oppression of the fair quickly dwindles as he realizes that Araby was far from the wonderful affair that it was advertised to be as well as never winning over the heart of Mangan’s sister. This is what Vogler calls The Ordeal. The boy has finally grown up. A part of him that is stuck on illusions and lies died, but produced a person who is now a bit wiser than before. Vogler tells us “The simple secret of the ordeal is this: Heroes must die so that they can be reborn… In some way in every story heroes face death or something like it: their greatest fears, the failure of an enterprise, the end of a relationship, the death of an old personality…” (Vogler, 159) Out of this death, rises a new

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