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Mangan’s sister is the unnamed object of the narrator’s adoration. She only has a few lines of dialogue in the whole story but her presence is felt on every page as the narrator seems to spend every waking moment thinking about this young woman. While the narrator has a powerful crush on Mangan’s sister, the relationship is entirely one-sided because the narrator is too frightened to even speak to the girl, much less make his feelings known. As a result, readers are able to determine that the narrator does not actually love Mangan’s sister, but rather the idea of her. Joyce guides the reader to the conclusion that Mangan’s sister represents a romantic ideal as opposed to a real person by not giving her a name. A name is an integral part of a person’s identity so by not naming the text’s romantic heroine, Joyce limits the reader’s understanding of Mangan’s sister to the little information that the narrator actually has of her.
