Imagery In Araby By James Joyce

Desire’s Play

James Joyce, a well known novelist and poet, in his short story “Araby” presents the readers with an innocent boy emerging into his teen feelings and his constant inner battle between religious beliefs and prohibited desires. Joyce uses a combination of religious words and a childish imagery to illustrate the transition of this young boy into a teenager. The boy’s confusion between his feelings towards his first love and a religious background that forbids sexual thoughts is what drives him to understand and begin to see the world of love with a different perspective. The boy, whom we don’t know his name or his age, has a deep confusion of what he is feeling towards a girl, whose name and age aren’t also revealed. Based on few passages from the story, it is suggested that the boy can be very young for his childish actions such as: “I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words,

“All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them…” (Araby). The age stage this young boy is going through cannot let him think clearly. His feelings were like a roller coaster. He felt adoration for this older girl, yet he felt his adoration was wrong. Similar to losing your temperament is what the word “slipping” suggests to me. Using the wrong words or making bad actions can cause you a big problem with whomever you talk to. His feelings were slipping to something he didn’t know, yet he was aware of. At a young age, its difficult to understand the meaning of situations that only time can clear up. The rain impinging upon the earth has a sexual connotation, as if the rain would take the earth by force millions on times, and each rain drop touching every single human nerve that would provoke chills all over the body, being this the way the boy felt towards the