Araby

James Joyce is associated strongly with the concept of epiphany. This was a new way modernists invented of ending a short story: the resolution came with a flashing, often life-changing moment of...

"Araby" ends with this passage: Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. The narrator speaks these words...

The bazaar first becomes a symbol of the exotic and romantic; later it represents his disillusions. The young boy, who acts as the narrator of James Joyce's story, becomes infatuated with the...

This final line of the short story lets us know that the narrator understands that, no matter how important his desires are to him, the world will not change for him or make way for his goals. The...

To the narrator, Araby symbolizes the beauty, mystery, and romance he longs for in his life. He lives in a dreary house on a shabby dead-end street. He escapes the drabness around him by reading a...

“Araby” is set in Dublin, Ireland in various places around the city. At the onset of the story, the boy is on the street where he lives, North Richmond Street. He frequently meets his friends and...

This sentence shows that the narrator has an idealized and spiritualized view of romantic love. A chalice has several associations. First, it alludes to Catholicism. A chalice is a sacred vessel...

An epiphany refers to a sudden revelation or insight, a moment of vision. In James Joyce’s “Araby,” however, the lovestruck narrator experiences a disappointment so intense and overwhelming that it...

To add to the previous post, Joyce describes a garden with an apple tree at its center. This is where the children--including the narrator--play. This reference ties in nicely to the Garden of...

Just to set the record straight so you don't leave this page believing a misconception about James Joyce, he was Irish, not English as I think coachingcorner writes. He is a cornerstone of...

James Joyce uses a number of literary devices in his short story, "Araby." A simile is the comparison of two dissimilar things that share similar characteristics, using "like" or "as." An example...

Towards the beginning of the story, the young narrator has a brief conversation with Mangan's sister, who tells him that she cannot make it to the Araby bazaar. The narrator is infatuated with...

One could argue that the central conflict in “Araby” is between fantasy and reality. The unnamed narrator, a young boy living in a shabby-genteel part of Dublin, wants to escape from his everyday...

James Joyce's "Araby" depicts a solemn, stale atmosphere. The street where the narrator and his friends play is a blind, or a dead end. The houses are "brown," with "imperturbable faces," the...

In this story's rising action, we are introduced to the young boy and his life in Dublin, as well as is his intense emotions for Mangan's sister, the girl he wishes to impress. As the story...

Joyce uses a first person narrative point of view in "Araby" to tell the story of a boy who learns that his romantic feelings for a girl are illusory. The boy's perspective is mirrored by his...

One of the key facts you need to realise about the relationship between the narrator and Mangan's sister is that it is almost non-existent. Remember that we never know her name, she is only...

The uncle's reciting of the poem can be taken a number of ways. First, his recitation of the poem is an indication of his absentmindedness. He can't seem to remember (or attach any importance to)...

Throughout the story, the narrator is enamored of Mangan's sister. He watches for her through the mostly-drawn blinds, waiting until she appears on her doorstep, and then he runs "to the hall,...

Another theme revolves around religion and faith. The narrator has grown up Catholic, and has been sternly instructed in the dogma of this religion. He associates his life with the images and...

To the narrator of "Araby," Mangan's sister represents romance and beauty. One might even call her his ideal of beauty, since he contemplates every aspect of her appearance and movement with a...

Mangan's sister is the object of the narrator's affection and is unaware of the narrator's infatuation with her. She is associated with the Virgin Mary in the narrator's mind and is the focus of...

"Araby" reveals many details of life in Ireland that show the differences between it and the United States. As others have noted, the Roman Catholic church plays a large role in the life of this...

The narrator of "Araby" is written with a first-person perspective. The boy in "Araby" is a singular, first-person narrator. He tells the story from only his perspective, rather than including the...

The conflicts in the boy of "Araby" arise between his fantasy and reality. Discontent in his "brown" neighborhood, in his home that once belonged to a dead priest, living with his uncle and aunt,...

Its significance lies in the vision of an exotic world it conjures up for the story's young protagonist. This strange, exciting bazaar is suggestive of the mystical East, a far-off land full of...

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. Thus ends James Joyce's "Araby." The boy's epiphany involves his...

The first paragraph is as follows: North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two...

The narrator in "Araby" conflates (combines) his religious passion with his emerging romantic and sexual desires. Note that in the beginning of the story, he shows his interest in texts related to...

In James Joyce's short story, "Araby," there are almost countless numbers of literary devices/elements used. The first device is found at the beginning. Joyce employs personification, which is when...

In James Joyce's short story "Araby," which appears in his collection Dubliners, the young narrator is captivated by the sister of Mangan; he watches the girl from his window and follows her...

We are not told the exact age of the boy who narrates "Araby," but the story indicates he is at the cusp of a transition from boyhood to adolescence. He goes to school, he plays games with the...

Taken from James Joyce's Dubliners, "Araby" tells a coming of age story, following a young boy who is infatuated with a girl, referred to in the story as Mangan's sister. I don't think any story...

Araby by James Joyce is one of the short stories from the Dubliners series in which Joyce explores various life stages or potentially transformative events which stand to change the lives or...

Prior to going to the bazaar, the narrator is excited. He promised the young girl he thinks he loves that he would buy her something if he went to the bazaar. This only intensifies his feelings of...

The boy's late arrival at the bazaar called "Araby" is his uncle's fault. The boy can't leave for the bazaar until he gets some money. The adults in the story cannot understand the importance of...

In Joyce's "Araby," the first setting is described in terms of figurative blindness and paralysis (the street is a dead end, etc.) This reflects the young narrator's emotional and mental and...

The first words addressed to the narrator of this story by Mangan's sister, the object of his distant affections, are a query as to whether he is "going to Araby." Araby, she explains "would be a...

There may be several kinds of irony identified in James' Joyce's short story, "Araby." Perhaps the most striking example surrounds the bazaar when the narrator arrives. First, consider one...

The dynamic between the narrator and his uncle in James Joyce's "Araby" is an interesting one, although it's touched on briefly. In the story, the narrator anxiously waits for his uncle to return...

The young narrator, who lives a dull life in Dublin, dreams of the bazaar called Araby. The bazaar conflates or merges in his imagination with Mangan's sister, on whom he has a crush. Both...

The narrator believed himself to be deeply in love with his friend Mangan's sister. He describes her as being bathed in light, literally, even when all around her seems dark. He had not even spoken...

In "Araby," Joyce employs much religious symbolism to bring one of his major themes to fruition: the incongruity of the secular and the sacred. The entire story is a religious quest revolving...

The boy in James Joyce’s short story “Araby” is characterized in a number of different ways, including the following: He grows up in relatively poor and unpromising circumstances, but he does not...

It is clear from the way that Mangan's sister is presented that the narrator is interested not so much in Mangan's sister herself, but in what his fevered, romantic imaginings make her. The very...

The narrator feels nothing less than a complete childish infatuation with Mangan's sister. He views her with almost saint-like reverence, and indeed, the way she is described through the first...

The narrator's expectations of what he hopes to find at Araby are very much wedded with the quest he feels he has been given by Mangan's sister, who basically persuades the young boy to go to the...

Religion, or to be more precise, Roman Catholicism, forms the backdrop to the events of "Araby." The unnamed narrator lives in a country in which the Catholic Church enjoys considerable power and...

The two occasions that Mangan's sister is involved in this narrative both describe her as being surrounded by some kind of angelic aura that clearly shows the narrator's feelings about her and how...

The boy's home is on a "quiet street" where the houses all have "brown imperturbable faces." The air inside is "musty," and one room is "littered with old useless papers." A priest, the previous...