The Inexistence of Father Christmas in Araby

568 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Impact of religion in society

“Araby” tells a story about a little boy’s romance and his disillusionment in the end. While people tend to focus on the ending of the story trying to find some clue from Araby the market alone, I believe there is another site that we should not forget—the room where the priest died. It seems Araby symbolizes the numb, dark adult world while the room is holy, romantic; but as I read more, I find they are quite the same. Comparing the two buildings, one of the hidden reasons for the boy’s anger dawned on me: he is deceived by both sites.

The narrations of the drawing-room where the priest died and appeared Araby are quite alike mainly three ways. First, both places are all in a dark and quiet scene when the boy encounters them. He goes in the room in a “dark, raining evening, and there was no sound in the house” (para.6), while Araby is “in darkness” (para.25) and he “recognized a silence” (para.25). Their impression left on the boy is almost the same.

Second, the boy associates the two places with religion and love. The room is where a priest died, which brings the room together...

Show More
Related

  • The Decline of Chivalry Explored in Araby and A&P

    1205 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Araby” tells the story of a young boy who romanticizes over his friend’s older sister. He spends a lot of time admiring the girl from a distance. When the girl finally talks to him, she reveals she cannot go to the bazaar taking place that weekend, he sees it as a chance to impress her. He tells her that he is going and will buy her something. The boy becomes overwhelmed by the opportunity to perform this chivalrous act for her, surely allowing him to win the affections of the girl. The night of the bazaar, he is forced to wait for his drunken uncle to return home to give him money to go. Unfortunately, this causes the boy to arrive at the bazaar as it is closing. Of the stalls that remained open, he visited one where the owner, and English woman, “seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty” (Joyce 89) and he knows he will not be able to buy anything for her. He decides to just go home, realizing he is “a creature driven and derided with vanity” (Joyce 90). He is angry with himself and embarrassed as he...

    Read More

  • Examples Of Postlapsarianism

    1085 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Araby” is a bildungsroman story, about coming of age, the passing through innocence to experience. This story takes place in Ireland, but in the boys dreams he visualizes Araby, a very exotic or “sexy” setting, in the east, similar setting to Aladin. It is a place of high wealth and romance, the perfect setting for a young boy to come about his sexuality. He visualizes a woman in Araby, and wants to give her all the gifts he can, including a chalice from the church. The problem with this twelve year old boy giving this woman a chalice is that the chalice is used to carry Jesus’s blood, and in a very religious place of Dublin, Ireland, this would be a horrible sin to use a chalice as a form of sexuality. The young boy in this story wants to confess his love for Meghan’s sister but does not understand how or why he wants to do this. His mind is trying to pass over from innocence to experience, prelapsarianism to postlapsarianism, but the people surrounding him do not give him the information to complete this change. As a result of this, the young boy becomes frustrated and angry, but he does not exactly know why. Dublin in this time is not the place for having sexual thoughts before marriage, and that is all this young boy will

    Read More

  • Allusions In Araby Research Paper

    692 Words  | 2 Pages

    As soon as “Araby” begins, the religious allusions do also. Joyce immediately puts readers in a religious frame of mind as the narrator speaks of the Christian Brother’s School and the priest who formerly lived in his house. Shortly after a religious mindset is formed, the narrator speaks of “the wild garden behind the house [containing]

    Read More

  • Arby

    1404 Words  | 3 Pages

    James Joyce's use of religious imagery and religious symbols in "Araby" is compelling. That the story is concerned somehow with religion is obvious, but the particulars are vague, and its message becomes all the more interesting when Joyce begins to mingle romantic attraction with divine love. "Araby" is a story about both wordly love and religious devotion, and its weird mix of symbols and images details the relationship--sometimes peaceful, sometimes tumultuos--between the two. In this essay, I will examine a few key moments in the story and argue that Joyce's narrator is ultimately unable to resolve the differences between them.

    Read More

  • Foreshadowing In The Journey To Araby

    216 Words  | 1 Pages

    The journey to Araby is a foreshadowing of the great disappointment to come. The boy embarks on his quest to Araby by train and seems surprised that the journey does not immediately place him in exotic surroundings; instead, the boy finds himself "in a third-class carriage of a deserted train" that slowly creeps past "ruinous houses" to drop him at an "improvised wooden platform" (Joyce 113). The boy does not let this first disappointment to deter him entering the "would be splendid bazaar" with his high expectations intact, but as soon as he enters the hall that houses Araby he senses that his idyllic fantasies have led him astray (Joyce 112). Instead of being greeted with the hustle and bustle of the exotic, the boy is met with a "silence

    Read More

  • James Joyce's Araby - Auditory Imagery in Araby

    399 Words  | 1 Pages

    Finally, when the boy enters the bazaar, he recognizes "a silence like that which pervades a church after a church service.

    Read More

  • James Joyce's Dubliners

    1429 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the story “Araby,” the boy has a negative view of the community. Many aspects of his life affect the way he sees the things around him. For example, because of his uncle, he is unable to reach the bazaar in time. This makes him angry and frustrated. Although the boy reminds his uncle about the bazaar, his uncle forgets and comes home very late and the boy says to himself, “I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten (25).” He teases the boy and tells him not to go, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” meaning working too hard with no fun makes you a boring person. Because all the boy’s desires are focused on his goal of getting the gift at the bazaar, he becomes frustrated. The boys’ uncle is one of the people the boy is around all the time; this frustration causes him to become very jittery and get irritated with the world around him. By things like the clock ticking it gradually drove him to just have to totally change his train of thought and just dwell on the girl and the boy thinks, “...

    Read More

  • Jehovah's Witnesses and Christmas

    530 Words  | 2 Pages

    What does Christmas mean to you? Some might say that Christmas revolves around family, presents, and religion. Why then do Jehovah’s Witnesses abstain from participating in Christmas? Contrary to popular opinion, Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians. However, after thorough research of the origins of Christmas, they have found that many aspects of Christmas have pagan origins and are not supported by the Bible.

    Read More

  • Themes of Alienation and Control in James Joyce's Araby

    1851 Words  | 4 Pages

    The story begins as the boy describes his neighborhood. Immediately feelings of isolation and hopelessness begin to set in. The street that the boy lives on is a dead end, right from the beginning he is trapped. In addition, he feels ignored by the houses on his street. Their brown imperturbable faces make him feel excluded from the decent lives within them. The street becomes a representation of the boy’s self, uninhabited and detached, with the houses personified, and arguably more alive than the residents (Gray). Every detail of his neighborhood seems designed to inflict him with the feeling of isolation. The boy's house, like the street he lives on, is filled with decay. It is suffocating and “musty from being long enclosed.” It is difficult for him to establish any sort of connection to it. Even the history of the house feels unkind. The house's previous tenant, a priest, had died while living there. He “left all his money to institutions and the furniture of the house to his sister (Norton Anthology 2236).” It was as if he was trying to insure the boy's boredom and solitude. The only thing of interest that the boy can find is a bicycle pump, which is rusty and rendered unfit to play with. Even the “wild” garden is gloomy and desolate, containing but a lone apple tree and a few straggling bushes. It is hardly the sort of yard that a young boy would want. Like most boys, he has no voice in choosing where he lives, yet his surroundings have a powerful effect on him.

    Read More

  • A Journey into Self-Discovery in Araby by James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield’s, The Garden Party

    1267 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout “Araby”, the main character experiences a dynamic character shift as he recognizes that his idealized vision of his love, as well as the bazaar Araby, is not as grandiose as he once thought. The main character is infatuated with the sister of his friend Mangan; as “every morning [he] lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door…when she came on the doorstep [his] heart leaped” (Joyce 108). Although the main character had never spoken to her before, “her name was like a summons to all [his] foolish blood” (Joyce 108). In a sense, the image of Mangan’s sister was the light to his fantasy. She seemed to serve as a person who would lift him up out of the darkness of the life that he lived. This infatuation knew no bounds as “her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance…her name sprang to [his] lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which [he] did not understand” (Joyce 109). The first encounter the narrator ex...

    Read More

  • Loss of Innocence in Araby by James Joyce

    853 Words  | 2 Pages

    The short story “Araby” by James Joyce is told by what seems to be the first person point of view of a boy who lives just north of Dublin. As events unfold the boy struggles with dreams versus reality. From the descriptions of his street and neighbors who live close by, the reader gets an image of what the boy’s life is like. His love interest also plays an important role in his quest from boyhood to manhood. The final trip to the bazaar is what pushes him over the edge into a foreshadowed realization. The reader gets the impression that the narrator is the boy looking back on his epiphany as a matured man. The narrator of “Araby” looses his innocence because of the place he lives, his love interest, and his trip to the bazaar.

    Read More

  • A Comparison Of Araby And Eveline By J. Joyce

    1114 Words  | 3 Pages

    Both “Araby” and “Eveline” are characterized by melancholic, even depressive mood. In the first case, the sadness associations are developed by the motifs of darkness and silence that reinforce the boy’s psychological state. The boy says that “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves” (108) which means that he wants to become invisible, to disappear, and darkness and silence are helpful for him alleviating his pain: “I was thankful that I could see so little” (108). In “Eveline”, the mood is also melancholic and depressive, but this time the feeling of melancholy is combined with nostalgia and a fear of the uncertain future. It reveals itself in Eveline’s memories of her deceased mother, her brothers, her friends, in her looking at the things associated with her previous life: “Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided” (1). And what concerns the tone, in both “Araby” and “Eveline” it may be described as serious though not solemn as the narration lacks too eloquent expressions, and the context concerns more daily routine than some elevated

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of Araby And The Dead By James Joyce

    1033 Words  | 3 Pages

    The narrator in “Araby” is a young man who lives in an uninteresting area and dreary house in Dublin. The only seemingly exciting thing about the boy’s existence is the sister of his friend Mangum that he is hopelessly in love with; “…her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” (Joyce 2279) In an attempt to impress her and bring some color into his own gray life, he impulsively lies to her that he is planning on attending a bazaar called Arab. He also promises the gi...

    Read More

  • History of christmas

    476 Words  | 1 Pages

    People have celebrated a mid-winter festival since pre-historic times. They marked the beginning of longer hours of daylight with fires and ritual offerings. The Roman festival of Saturnalia -- a time for feasting and gambling -- lasted for weeks in December. Germanic tribes of Northern Europe also celebrated mid-winter with feasting, drinking and religious rituals.

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis of Joyce's Araby

    1021 Words  | 3 Pages

    In many cultures, childhood is considered a carefree time, with none of the worries and constraints of the “real world.” In “Araby,” Joyce presents a story in which the central themes are frustration, the longing for adventure and escape, and the awakening and confusing passion experienced by a boy on the brink of adulthood. The author uses a single narrator, a somber setting, and symbolism, in a minimalist style, to remind the reader of the struggles and disappointments we all face, even during a time that is supposed to be carefree.

    Read More

More about The Inexistence of Father Christmas in Araby

Open Document