payment page
Real life does not often live up to our fantasies.
The unnamed narrator of “Araby” has a lot of romanticized expectations at the start of the text. Unfortunately for him, he will learn over the course of the story that real life does not always adhere to our daydreams. He longs for Mangan’s sister from afar with the passion of a tortured Romantic hero, but he is ultimately unable to make a meaningful connection with her. He is confident that his uncle will aid him on his quest, but he is let down when his uncle forgets their plans and arrives so late that he is barely able to make the right train. He is swept up in “Eastern enchantment[s]” from the moment he learns about Araby, but the bazaar does not live up to the exotic image that he has fabricated in his mind. “Araby” is a tale of unrequited love, but it is also a coming-of-age text as Joyce attributes the young narrator’s growing disillusionment with the world around him to his budding maturity. Joyce offers a pessimistic view of childhood because he essentially argues that childhood is an extended fantasy that needs to be destroyed in order for a person to enter the adult world.
It is easy to become trapped by our own inaction.
The narrator of “Araby” has debilitating moments of paralysis that bookend the text. At the start of the story, he is barely able to speak when Mangan’s sister asks him if he intends to go to the bazaar even though he has been pining after her for a long time. At the end of the story, he is unable to make a purchase when he arrives at Araby even though he feels this is the only way to make his feelings known to Mangan’s sister. These two key moments reveal that the narrator of “Araby” has a rich inner world but often struggles to act in the real world. The narrator takes a passive role in his own happiness because he resigns himself to a life of watching from afar instead of participating in the world around him. Through the narrator, Joyce warns his readers that one can easily become paralyzed by their own inability to act. If we do not heed Joyce’s lesson, we are doomed, like our young narrator, to gaze at the world through a window instead of taking initiative. However, “Araby” is not a completely pessimistic tale. The narrator is still, after all, only a young boy on the cusp of adolescence. Perhaps, with time, he will learn to act as he matures.
Secularism will eventually replace religion.
Religion purveys almost every page in “Araby.” However, these references to religion feel more like a relic of the past as opposed to an indicator of reality. The most obvious example is the dead priest who used to live in what is now the narrator’s house. The death of the priest symbolizes the death of religion. The narrator is uninterested in the religious side of their home’s former tenant and is, instead, only intrigued by the material objects that the priest left behind such as a rusty bicycle pump and some old books. The religious schools that the narrator and all the other children in the text attend are also under scrutiny. The narrator rejects the Christian Brothers' School and claims that his lessons are childish, unimportant, and keep him from daydreaming about Mangan’s sister. The girls’ equivalent of the Christian Brothers' School also causes problems because the convent that Mangan’s sister attends prevents her from going to Araby. In both instances, the religious schools get in the way of what the protagonists actually want. The replacement of religion for secularism is a subtle component of “Araby,” but the text’s repeated allusions to religion indicate that Joyce intended it to be one of the text’s main ideas.
