The narrator describes the girl, who is the sister of his friend Mangan, in terms that reflect his infatuation with her.

She wears a dress that is loose enough to swing in rhythm with her body. She has a "soft rope" of hair that moves from side to side as the narrator watches her. The girl is a "brown figure" whom the narrator searches for each morning as he lays on the floor in his own front parlor, watching her door for a sign of her emergence.

Eventually, she and the narrator share a conversation about his plans to attend the bazaar in Araby, and the narrator notices that she wears a silver bracelet, which she constantly spins around her wrist. He also observes the way the light catches the "white curve of her neck" and makes visible the "white border of a petticoat" underneath her dress.

It is in these little details of her appearance and the narrator's awed tone as he conveys those details that his admiration of Mangan's sister is made clear.

What are the character traits of the narrator in "Araby"?

The narrator in "Araby" is deeply sensitive, romantic, and naive. These qualities are partly attributable to his youth, and he changes significantly at the end of the story, losing much of his innocence in the bitterness of disappointment. The story contains several evocative descriptions of first love, which highlight the boy's exquisite sensitivity.

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom.

The words in parenthesis here highlight the narrator's sense of helplessness. He does not understand quite what is happening to him, and he struggles to articulate his feelings for Mangan's sister. Later, he compares his body to a harp and everything the girl says and does to fingers that play upon its strings. This emphasizes just how helpless he feels in coping with these new, unfamiliar emotions.

The narrator's sensitivity is also clear in the acuteness of his observations and descriptions throughout the story. Though he may be unreliable in his description of his beloved, he is capable of describing the settings, North Richmond Street and the Araby bazaar, clearly and in detail.

Please describe narrator in "Araby."

The narrator is a Dubliner in Dubliners by James Joyce, the story collection "Araby" is included in.  Just as the street and neighborhood is described, indirectly or figuratively, as blind, so is the narrator.  He becomes obsessed with an illusion, a combination of his idealistic view of Mangan's sister, and his idealistic view of his relationship with Mangan's sister.

He suffers terribly, like an adoliescent will, in the days preceeding his trip to buy her a gift at the traveling bazaar, Araby.  He neglects his studies and can think of nothing else.  He is blind to the truth that Mangan's sister hardly even knows he exists, and that they do not really have much of a relationship.

The combination of the bazaar being closed (for the most part), the trivial, senseless flirting by the workers he overhears, the rudeness of the worker who asks him if he needs anything, and something about the few items for sale, leads him to sight, figuratively.  He realizes how silly he's been, that he's been infatuated with and controlled by an illusion.  He states his epiphany in the final lines of the story:

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

Notice the reference to the eyes.  His eyes figuratively fool him into falling for an illusion.  Now, they are figuratively opened. 

Provide a character analysis of the narrator in "Araby."

James Joyce's short story "Araby" portrays a boy in early adolescence trying to break away from childhood and fumbling toward adulthood. This desire to move away from childhood is articulated in terms of his first crush, which happens to be on his friend Mangan's sister. This crush is so overpowering that it eclipses everything else in his life. After he promises Manga's sister that he will buy something for her at a bazaar, Joyce tells us he "had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between [him] and [his] desire, seemed to [him] child's play, ugly monotonous child's play." Notice how derisively he refers to the life around him as "child's play"—something he wants to be rid of on his way to adulthood.

Joyce deploys imagery of dark and light to make it clear exactly what the crush on Mangan's sister means to the narrator. Throughout the early paragraphs of the story, in which we see the narrator playing with his friends, Joyce's descriptions are full of darkness and drab colors. That darkness is the life that he's known up to now. When we see Mangan's sister, though, the description changes. The narrator says, "The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing.” She is described in terms of light, not dark. If dark characterizes the life he has known up to this point, then light characterizes something new, a break from the past.

The narrator's attraction to this girl is entirely based on novelty. She is something different, an alternative to the drab, dull life he's known before. We might say he is in love with being in love; it is completely one-sided. The reader never learns anything substantial about her because the narrator doesn't know it either. We don't even learn her name. It is interesting to note that the bazaar where the narrator plans to buy her a present is modeled after a Middle Eastern bazaar—something that would be a novelty in Dublin, Ireland. The narrator says, “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.” What draws him to the bazaar is the lure of the exotic. It is this exact same attraction that draws him to Mangan's sister.