What are the similarities and differences in life experiences, social positions, and dreams of "Eveline" and the boy in "Araby"?

Both Eveline and the young adolescent narrator of "Araby" come from lower middle class Dublin families. Both have little status within their family units. Both feel frustrated and suffocated by their lives, and both dream of escape to a better, more romantic existence.

Eveline works in a store where she feels undervalued and dissatisfied. Her mother is dead, and she turns over all of her wages to her father, who she lives in fear of. He shows her very little kindness or affection. The boy in "Araby" lives with his aunt and uncle. His uncle is a heavy drinker who pays little attention to the boy and is largely oblivious to his needs. The boy is dissatisfied with school and his dull, drab life in Dublin.

Eveline meets a sailor and makes plans to elope with him to Argentina, but at the last minute, her crippling indoctrination in religion and duty to her family, as well as a highly sentimentalized memory of a rare instance of her father's kindness, paralyzes her so that she turns away from freedom and back to her restrictive Dublin life.

The boy in "Araby" attempts to escape his own drab existence through his crush on Mangan's sister, an adoration colored with religious imagery, and his desire to buy her a gift at the bazaar called Araby. Araby is a longed-for event which he infuses with an aura of mystery and romance. However, when he arrives at Araby, he realizes it is no different from the rest of his Dublin life, and so he feels trapped, frustrated and humiliated at his own illusions.

Both stories show Dublin as a drab, dark, narrow, oppressive place where religion and patriarchal family structures stifle and restrict lives that might otherwise expand and grow. One very much wishes that both of Joyce's protagonists in question could escape their claustrophobic lives and a society that seems to offer them little opportunity for fulfillment.

In "Araby," an interesting cultural element is revealed. School students seem to have attended school on Saturday:

On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaarI left the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school.

Additionally, schoolboys seem to be ignored in shopping districts, if the behavior of the sealesgirl at the bazar may be taken as a generalized illustration:

the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty.

This rather contrasts with today when the teenage dollar comprises a large and mighty demographic.

Many relevant comments on this topic can be found by going to Google Books and searching for "Eveline and Araby."  By searching for the titles of the two stories side-by-side one is likely to find sources that compare and contrast the two works. Here is what I found when I did such a search:

http://www.google.com/search?q=eveline+and+araby&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1

I thought it would be interesting what would happen if I searched for "social class in Eveline and Araby."  Here are the search results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=social+class+in+eveline+and+araby&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1

Let us remember that the poverty experienced by Ireland impacted these two characters as well, and both short stories give us revealing descriptions of the drab and enclosed lives that both are trapped in. Whether it is the dead-end street of the boy in "Araby" or the claustraphobia experienced by Eveline, it is clear that both characters lead lives that are profoundly limited in terms of opportunity and escape.

Oh, ....The short stories "Araby" and "Eveline" are from James Joyce's "stages of man" work, Dubliners. Occupied by the British, the Protestant minority that was the ruling elite, Joyce perceived Dublin as the center of Irish paralysis, the frustrating awareness of the Irish people's powerlessness to do anything about their situations, along with their religious servility.  The characters of "Araby" and "Eveline" both dwell in little brown houses that harbor gloom and despair over which a dominating Catholicism casts its shadows; they are the adolescents of the stages of life in Dubliners, adolescents who dream of what is not real, disillusioned youths and failures. With his eyes burning with "anguish and anger," and her cry of anguish that falls upon the sea, the boy of "Araby" and Eveline, then, fall into the lower-middle-class-desperation of the crowded streets of the city.

How do "Araby" and "Eveline" from Joyce's Dubliners compare and contrast?

James Joyce writes of the tragic Irish of Dublin in his anthology of stories, "The Dubliners."  For one thing, there is often a delusion that occurs with these characters as they attempt to alter circumstances in their lives.  For instance, in "Araby" the boy perceives Megan's sister as a perfection, much like the maiden for whom the knight strives.  The boy watches across the street and worships from afar this girl who, in his mind, is a paragon.  He envisions himself at the market as he carries her parcels,

I bore the chalice safely through a throng of foes.  Her name sprang to m lips at moments in strange prayer and praises which I myself did not understand.

Likewise, Eveline has a romanticized attitude about the sailor who has come from foreign lands.  He is there, much like the boy's imagined knight, to rescue her.  She dreams of leaving her abusive father and immigrating to another land.  Like the colored print of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the French nun who had a series of visions of the Sacred Heart that hangs on the wall, Eveline envisions the sailor as her savior. However, the reality of the little brother not being also saved strikes Eveline and she is paralyzed as she and her sailor are ready to board the great ship. In an epiphany, she realizes that she does not possess the courage to go, but she perceives danger in the sailor, instead,

a bell changed upon her heart.  She felt him seize her hand....all the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.  He was drawing her into them; he would drown her.  She gripped with both hands at the iron railing....Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

In "Araby," the boy experiences his epiphany when he realizes that he has created the exotic illusion of Megan's sister; when he arrives at the bazaar, all the booths are closed, and he only hears the petty prattle of the few vendors left:

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

Both characters in the two stories of Joyce experience epiphanies when they realize the truth of their romantic illusions and they are doomed to their lives in brown houses" that reach to "a blind end."  But, unlike the boy of "Araby" who understands that he is to blame for his self-deception, Eveline, at the end, views her sailor as the threat to her romantic idea, rather than her own lack of courage.

In the short story collection "Dubliners" by James Joyce, two stories "Araby" and "Eveline" have similarities and differences. One obvious similarity is that both stories concern what it is like to live in Dublin in the early part of the century. The perspectives are different however. "Araby" is written from the point of view of a young boy who has a crush on a slightly older girl. "Eveline" is written from a female point of view, about a boyfriend. Both stories are about unrealised wishes - the boy in "Araby" tries his hardest to while away the interminable waiting before he can get away to the market to buy a gift to impress the girl. He is disappointed and thwarted as the market is closing. His uncle made him late. "Eveline" however is thwarted in her dreams by herself, and her unwillingness to let go of a past that is at once both reassuringly familiar yet stultifyingly boring and dead.