What does the narrative in "Araby" reveal about the character's feelings towards the girl?

The young adolescent narrator of "Araby" develops a crush on his friend Mangan's older sister, whose family lives where he does on North Richmond Street. He feels physically attracted to her, watching her as

Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

She becomes idealized in his mind as someone set apart. He idolizes and adores her from afar, noting that he has hardly spoken more than a few words to her:

yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood

She represents romance to him. He pours into her all his intense and confused longings and desires:

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.

He also says of her:

I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: "O love! O love!" many times.

The narrator has turned Mangan's sister into a fantasy figure. As readers, we have every reason to believe she is simply a very ordinary girl. She dresses in brown, a color associated with the narrator's dull life in Dublin, and she lives on the same "blind" or dead end street that he does, attending a convent school. Her speech, when she does finally talk to him, is banal as she chatters about how she can't go to the bazaar Araby because she will be at a convent retreat, saying "It's well for you" that he'll be home.

In his blinded and lovestruck adoration, he promises to bring her a gift from Araby if he goes. The girl and the dreamed of bazaar, both of which symbolize his escape to more a romantic future, merge in his mind.

What does "Araby"'s narrative reveal about the narrator's feelings for the girl?

The narrator in the story idolizes and romanticizes Mangan's sister, a teenage girl a few years older than he is. He has hardly spoken to her but, nevertheless, she is an object of adoration to him. He has what might be called a schoolboy crush on the girl, but he feels it with all the acute intensity of adolescent love and tortured desire. He thinks about her often:

Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side. Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door....When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped....I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

He also expresses his adoration below:

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 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.

It is clear from these descriptions that he is in love with what she represents. She is a symbol of purity, of beauty, and of the exotic to him. She symbolizes, in his imagination, the alternative to his dull, schoolboy world. He builds her into a romantic idol he can worship.

In reality, the brown dress she wears and her commonplace speech and activities hint to us that she is a part of, rather than separate from, the drab Dublin world the narrator inhabits. Nevertheless, because he doesn't know her well, he can build her into a dream figure, just as he builds the Araby bazaar into a dream event. In his mind, the bazaar, which represents the exotic and escape from Dublin, merges or conflates in his mind with Mangan's sister so that reader is tempted to call her Araby. It is only at the end of the story that the boy's fantasies deflate.

What does "Araby"'s narrative reveal about the narrator's feelings for the girl?

In the narrative, the speaker reveals that he cares very deeply about Mangan's sister. She seems to be his first experience with love, or with emotions that feel very much like love. He describes how he would lie on the floor as he watched her front door, waiting for her to emerge so that he could grab his books and run outside to follow her on the walk to school. He says that "her name was like a summons to all [his] foolish blood." Even hearing her name, then, would make his heart beat faster and his blood seem to pump harder within his veins. The narrator imagines that he is like a hero that "bore [his] chalice safely through a throng of foes."

His heart is so full of her that he is untouched by other sounds and sights in the city, and they mean nothing to him; they all come together in a "single sensation of life." He would often cry while thinking of her and he would utter her name during his prayers. Having only ever spoken a few words to her in his life, he had no idea how he could ever express to her his "confused adoration" of her.

He feels like a musical instrument, and all of her movements and speech seemed to play upon him. When he thought of her, he murmured, "'O love! O love!'" over and over. After they finally speak, he becomes obsessed with getting her a gift from the Araby bazaar, and this is all he can think of.

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. 

How does the narrator describe the girl in "Araby"?

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.

How does the narrator describe the girl 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.

What attracts the narrator to the girl in "Araby"?

The narrator’s attraction is not based on authentic interaction or even on close observation of Mangan’s sister’s behavior or personality. Rather, the narrator’s attraction is based on dreams and fantasy. The fact that the narrator never actually mentions the girl’s name, instead stating that “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood,” is a hint at the foolishness of his feelings, which are quite superficial. The narrator imagines the girl by his side as he accompanies his aunt to the market, a dull activity, and imagines that he is in a sort of fairy tale during which “her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.” There is also repetition of the narrator’s description of the girl’s figure, which is mostly what he notices about her. He notices her neck and her clothing on several occasions, but nothing which indicates that he has a genuine interest in who she is. Rather, his interest in her is fueled by his hopes for something beyond what his life provides.

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.