Essay On How I Met My Husband Vs Araby

Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” and James Joyce's “Araby” are two stories where the reader believes they know the outcome of the story. Until the plot of each stories turn in different directions. The two stories parallel in structure and share a common theme of courtly love. The main differences come at the ends of the two stories. Where both characters experience their own epiphany and wake up smell the roses.
Both Munro’s and Joyce's stories parallel in structure through the majority of the stories. In both writings, the writings the protagonist is hit with love at first sight for a goddess like person. Both characters strive to be able to win over the person of their dreams. In Araby, the young lad is so mesmerized by the girl just “her image came between me and the page I strove to read” (Joyce 12). The boy could not get her out of his head even though they share no dialogue. This idea of early onset love is also seen in Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” when the young girl talks to the man of her dreams “My heart was knocking away, my tongue was dried up” (Munro 54). The girl is mesmerized by the pilot so much that she thinks she is in love with an

While both characters experience an epiphany, the way the two react is where the differences arise. Edie’s epiphany is that her dream pilot is never writing her back and that she needs to move on. Yet moving on was hard for her due to how “my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead” (Munro 198). To match Edie’s epiphany, the boy in Araby realized the girl next door was not the one for him, yet sadness did not follow his epiphany, rather anger, “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (Joyce 37). The boy’s eyes were open now to how all of his efforts would be useless and he could never win over the girl next door. Which angers him greatly due to how he is caught in the darkness and all out of