Araby, By James Joyce

The story, Araby, by James’s Joyce, is one of Joyce’s standout pieces of work as a writer. What makes this story so compelling is Joyce’s style in writing the text. When you read the short story for the first time a lot of the material goes over your head. But when you read between the lines you begin to understand the intended meaning of the text. This is why I chose to write my paper through the formalist perspective. The story revolves around a narrator who’s an unnamed young boy that becomes infatuated with his best friend’s older sister. The story represents the young boy’s rite of passage from being a naïve child to adulthood through the author’s use of plot, theme of alienation and setting. The main character's a young boy living with …show more content…
This is evident by the boy’s constant imagination and thought process that primarily focuses on the unnamed girl “Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance (Araby)”. Even when he wasn’t actually looking at her physically he would bring her with him mentally. And Instead of being outside and socializing with his friends he’s hiding behind a window and observing the girl from a distance. When he finally gets the chance to talk to her the conversation they had was awkward and meaningless. Instead of proclaiming his love for her or steering the conversation in a specific direction he becomes confused and flustered that she was actually speaking to him. The conversation ends with the boy promising to attend the bazaar because the girl had other priorities and could not be present. So the boy saw this as an opportunity to symbolize his love for her by presenting her with a gift upon his return from Araby. The boy so excited to set out on his journey becomes extremely intrigued by the thought of going to Araby. He describes the place to be luxurious, "The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.(Araby)" The name Araby derives from Middle Eastern Arabic nobility which seems very attractive to a child whose …show more content…
(Araby)” The word "blind" here I think describes the boy's connection to reality. Joyce's use of the word "dark" can be found multiple times throughout the text as we explore the dull and gloomy reality of Dublin through the young boys inexperienced eyes. The imagery used serves the purpose of conveying a dull mood neighborhood with no excitement. The boy mentions the street being blind and uses the same expression to describe his house, “An uninhabited house of two story’s stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces." This to me depicts the image of a dead end neighborhood, a place that leads to nowhere. This is why the boy becomes so excited to go to Araby and eventually get a gift for the unnamed girl. Seeing this as a chivalry act of winning the girls heart the boy becomes filled with expectations and hopes that he puts everything else aside to get to Araby, “I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play (Araby)”. The boy's approaching his final journey with extreme seriousness of an adult but doesn't realize he's doing it through the immaturity of a child.