Ugliness in Araby, by James Joyce

"Araby", a short story by James Joyce, is a despondent memory of adolescence narrated by a now grown man. The narrator recalls his first love, the older sister of his friend Mangan. He relates to us how he waited for her to leave her house for school before he would leave his house, trailing behind her until their ways parted, then passing her and going on his way. They had not had a conversation, until one day she asked him if he was going to Araby. Araby was the name of a bazaar that took place in Dublin in May 1894 (Beatty et al. 397). The narrator then, due to Mangan's sister's insistence that it would be "splendid" and that she would love to go (Joyce 397), decided to go to Araby, and to get her something there, because she could not attend. Once the idea was in his head, the narrator could think of nothing else, and the syllables of the word Araby grow to envelop the narrator and "cast an Eastern enchantment over [him]" (Joyce 397). The Saturday night of the Bazaar, the narrator's uncle, with whom he lived, returned home late. He was still allowed to go to the bazaar; however, he arrived shortly before it closed, and, as a result was unable to buy anything before it became dark. The setting in "Araby" is described in detail, and is important to the story: it sets the tone, and it helps us understand the characters.

The description of the neighborhood, in which the narrator and Mangan and his sister live, is where we begin to see the development of setting. The narrator describes the neighborhood as a quiet, dead end street, where the houses (except the uninhabited two-storey house) "gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces" (Joyce 395). It doesn't sound like it was an exciting neighborhood; in fact, we get the feeling that nothing happens in this kind of neighborhood at all. The lack of anything happening in their neighborhood helps us understand why the idea of Araby as something exotic and exciting was one that captured the narrator and Mangan's sister.

The setting of the neighborhood is described not only as boring, but also as dark, as almost foreboding. In winter, the neighborhood consisted of "dark muddy lanes behind the houses", "dark dripping gardens" and "dark odourous stables", where even the street lamps were feeble (Joyce 396).