quests he performs for Mangan's sister. 

These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. 

When Mangan's sister asks him about the bazaar, Araby, the narrator sees this a a connection with her, even a sign she is trying to indicate to him. He determines to go to Araby to buy her a souvenir, but in his mind it is more like a holy grail. For the narrator, "Araby" with its reference to Arab culture and the Middle East, represented something exotic: a great destination for someone on a quest for the girl he has feelings for.

Upon arriving at Araby, the narrator is disenchanted by the nonchalant, profit-interested workers. And it is at this moment that he has an epiphany that Araby is not as exotic as he'd thought, that Mangan's sister probably had not given him a second thought, and that his quest is not nearly as epic as it had been in his mind. The story is called "Araby" because it at first represented an exotic destination of a quest and then, following the epiphany, it was the site of the narrator's disenchantment. 

The title is so appropriate for this piece because it is the Araby bazaar that seems as though it will give the narrator his opportunity to escape his dull life and his opportunity to find a gift for Mangan's sister, which will make her fall in love with him the way he feels himself to be in love with her. The narrator is quite a romantic, feeling that her "name sprang to [his] lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which [he] did not understand." His eyes fill with tears when he thinks of her, and his "confused adoration" turns him into a kind of musical instrument that only her words or gestures can play.

The Araby bazaar is the subject of the first conversation they ever have together. She wishes she could go, and so he promises to bring her something if he goes. Thoughts of the bazaar become bound up with thoughts of her, and both "cast an Eastern enchantment over" him. He imagines himself like some kind of grail-chasing knight, bearing his "chalice safely through a throng of foes" to please her. In the end, when the narrator finally reaches the Araby bazaar after a number of setbacks and hurdles, it is neither exotic nor even anything special: just English tea sets and flirtatious adolescents and clinking coins. In the final moment of the story, he has his epiphany: that his feelings are not special either. He realizes how vain he has been to think that he or she was special, and he loses his innocence in the world.

The title of the story, "Araby," draws attention to the symbolism the bazaar acquires in the narrator's mind. It is inextricably linked to Mangan's sister as well as his own feelings of love for her, feelings that he puts above everything else in his life: his schoolwork, his family, and so on. He thinks that his feelings for this girl are so special and unique, just as this bazaar will be. When it turns out to be mundane, frustrating, and commercial, he realizes that his own feelings matter little in the world around him; money talks, but love does not.

The title is effective because it conjures up images of a strange, exotic land, a world of fantasy and adventure to which one can escape and leave behind one's boring workaday life.

That's what the unnamed narrator hopes to do by traveling to the bazaar of the story's title. He needs to get away from his miserable, humdrum existence in which there is no excitement or glamour. There is romance, to be sure, in the from of his boyish infatuation with Mangan's sister, but the future of that incipient relationship is largely dependent on his coming back from "Araby" with a shiny new gift for her.

But the boy's fantasy world comes crashing down as he arrives at the bazaar just as it's closing down. The exotic land of Araby, with its seemingly endless promise, has suddenly vanished into thin air.

A flashback defines the part of story where the narrative is interrupted to recount something that happened prior to the start of the story. In "Araby," this occurs in the second paragraph, where the narrator jumps back to his memories of first moving into his house, once owned by a priest, and what he found there. He also offers some wry information about the priest himself that is not included in the quote below:

Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. . . .

Foreshadowing hints at what is to come next in a story. Although the narrator is wrapped up in dreams of Araby, he also offers unsettling hints that the bazaar is not going to turn out well for him. He writes of the morning of the bazaar that:

I felt the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me.

The feeling he has that all is not going to proceed as he wishes accurately forecasts what will happen: his uncle will have forgotten he said the boy could go, will go out drinking, and will come home late.

Holy cow: 3 sentences!  This story is worth much more because of its intensity of emotion and its final disappointment.

However:

I think the flashback occurs when the narrator returns to the room where the priest had died, and the narrator retreats into himself.

There are several examples of foreshadowing; you'll have to take your pick.

Early in the story the narrator says

[Mangand's sister's] dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

This is such a strong hint of the narrator's infatuation that it made me sit up and take notice.  I could imagine how the story was going to proceed.

Earlier in the same paragraph the narrator says

If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow . . .

Already we suspect the uncle is going to be the narrator's obstacle.

The narrator's infatuation grows rapidly, and Joyce paints it vividly.  I think a better topic for studying this story would be to examine Joyce's imagery.

Foreshadowing again: on Saturday morning the narrator reminds his uncle of the fair, the the uncle replies

"Yes, boy, I know."

So we are not surprised when the uncle returns almost too late in the evening for the fair to still be open.

I suppose that's plenty for three sentences.  I'm afraid you'll have to trim it a bit.  This story deserves much more attention.

The reference gives the text of the story.

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 around Mangan's sister, who functions as the Virgin Mary. The "quest" is for the Holy Grail, or her love, but the boy has confused religiousity with lust.

This confusion of the secular and the spiritual begins right away. Consider the second paragraph, which depits the dead priest's library where the boy likes to spend much of his time. The three books that are his favorite are not tomes of religious instruction, but secular works of intrigue. His moral instruction has been compromised from the beginning.

We see how quickly the boy makes Mangan's sister the object of his devotion and shrouded lust. As he observes her unawares, the boy describes "her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door." Think about how much like the glow of a halo around the Virgin Mary this seems.

In the following paragraph, the boy says that, "Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door." When a penitent comes before a holy figure, he is supposed to prostrate himself, and this is precisely what the protagonist does.

Furthermore, like a saint watching over him, the boy says, "Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance." We see the confusion here once again, as the image is holy but the secular is corrupted by lust/romance.

Here, in perhaps the most direct and poignant moments of confusion, the boy says, almost prayer-fully:

I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. 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. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

Unpacking these sentences, we find it rife with religious symbolism. The chalice is the "Holy Grail," the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper and the subject of thousands of years of pursuit to reclaim.  Instead of the Virgin Mary, it is Mangan's sister's name who springs to his lips in "prayers and praises." The boy reaches a religious ecstasy in contemplation of the girl, so moved is he that he cries. He is full, by his own admission, of adulation.

The boy goes on a quest for her, but realizes, when the fog has lifted, that he has confused the secular and the sacred. Denied his grail in the end, Magdan's sister is no longer shrouded in mystery. She becomes just a girl, nothing special, and the boy collapses in his own shame and guilt.

Well, this question is a little difficult to answer as really, this is not an allegorical story in the same way that a story like "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathanial Hawthorne would be an allegorical story. In such allegorical stories, characters, settings and events stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities. If you wanted to push the allegorical reading, you could argue that the narrator represents Romantic innocence, and that by the end of the story, when he experiences his epiphany, he then comes to represent experience as he realises his own foolishness and illusions and how they had dominated his life. Certainly, the key moment of the story is this epiphany, which comes at the end of the tale:

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

It is at this point that the narrator experiences a moment of self-knowledge, and we know as readers that he will never be the same after this experience.

So, whilst this tale is not normally considered to be an allegory, I think if you really wanted to you could "force" an allegorical interpretation, focussing on the narrator and his transition from innocence to experience.

Much of the symbolism in the work revolves around Catholicism. One example of symbolism is the Catholic priest, who could be said, given the overall ambivalence toward the Catholic Church in the work, could be said to represent the entire Church. The bazaar represents exoticism in the rather parochial world of Dublin, and the boy's trip there is somewhat of a pilgrimage. Mangan's sister is an example of chasteness and femininity, traits associated with the Virgin Mary. On the other hand, both the pawnbroker's widow and Araby itself might be read as representative of crass commercialism and materialism, with Araby being a notably shallow form of it. 

Much of the conflict in James Joyce's story of a young boy's love is derived from his confusion of love with religious fervor.  In addition, the exotic excitement generated by his anticipation of the forthcoming bazaar affects his perception of his infatuation with Mangan's sister.  Indeed, the many allusions in Joyce's narrative serve to develop and strengthen his themes. 

Allusions in "Araby"

• Religious allusions to the Catholic Church are frequent as Joyce felt the Roman Catholic religion had a stultifying effect upon the Irish.

1. Christian Brothers' School
2. The Devout Communicant, a work of Catholic devotional literature by English Franciscan, Pacificus Baker.
3. "my chalice," the cup used in the Eucharist of the Catholic Mass. This chalice also alludes to the Holy Grail, the cup used at the Last Supper. 
4. "two men were counting money on a salver" is a reference to Matthew 21:12-13.

• Irish cultural allusions thread throughout "Araby."

1. The houses with "brown imperturbable faces" alludes to another work of Joyce's:  In Stephen Hero, Joyce refers to "one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation or Irish paralysis"; thus, his allusion suggests the motif of paralysis.
2. Mangan's sister's name is, perhaps, an intended allusion to the nineteenth century Irish romantic poet of doomed love and agonized despair James Clarence Mangan.
3. "O'Donovan Rossa" is an allusion to Jeremiah O'Donovan, a Fenian (ERA) revolutionary and member of Parliament elect in 1869 when serving a life sentence for treason-felony against the British government.
4. "some Freemason affair" alludes to a function by the Society of Freemasons, an organization repudiated by Catholics because it has been suspected by Catholics of atheism, anti-Catholicism, and Protestant bigotry.
5. "The Arab's Farewell to his Steed" is a poem by the irish poet Caroline Norton.

• Other allusions

1. Araby The poetic name for Arabia:  The Orient was a place of European romance and fantasy in the nineteenth century as it was a place where the exotic, the sensual and refined cruelty were involved. In addition, Thomas Moore's ballad, "Farewell-farewell to thee, Araby's daughter" is also suggested.
2. The Memoirs of Vidocq is a very popular account of the exploits of a criminal who turned detective.