Araby by James Joyce

 This blog is Related to Short Story "Araby" By James Joyce. 

JAMES JOYCE

Biography

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic.

 Born -  2 February, 1882

 Death - 13 January, 1941

He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses  is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  and Finnegans Wake. His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

Summary of Araby

The short story ''Araby'' is one of fifteen stories by James Joyce published in his first book of fiction, Dubliners (1914). Each story stands on its own, but all are linked by the setting of early-20th century Dublin , and they progress thematically from a focus on childhood innocence to age, helplessness and disillusionment. Besides its unique structure, Dubliners was also significant for the realism with which it depicted Dublin and urban life, generally. The sentimentalism of Charles Dickens' London, where young diamonds shine forth from the grime and grit, and the seedy excitement of Balzac's Paris are wholly absent from Joyce's city. Instead, the camera-like lens of his realistic style, setting the tone for early 20th-century literary Modernism, is deployed to convincingly persuade readers that this is a dreary and paralyzed town, smothered by tradition and hopelessness. Ireland was still a colony of Britain, then, but won a bloody independence several years after the book's publication; The outbreak of war in 1919 was sudden, but the first signs were seen in 1916's Easter Rising. In these early stories by Joyce, there's no sense that change would be coming, but even when it did, the everyday culture that he depicted had not radically changed. For his part, he would remain only increasingly disillusioned with his native society; He believed that its violent nationalism had not freed the people's spirits, merely caged them in another terrible, largely unthinking ideology.

Araby is placed third in the collection, after two stories about children verging on a loss of innocence, through  an encounter with adult morality and perversity. The unnamed narrator of ''Araby'' is a preteen boy falling in love for the first time, with his friend Mangan's sister. Since she won't be able to visit the itinerant Araby bazaar, he offers to go and fetch her something wonderful. However, he doesn't manage to get there until late at night, when it's already closing down. He finds himself disenchanted with the bazaar's banal reality, totally unlike his and his friend's sister's romantic dreams of it. It's mostly deserted, the stallholders that remain count their money and converse of everyday banalities and, worse, with English accents. His vision of release and escape from his own humdrum life dissolves, as does his ephemeral passion for the girl. Indeed, he comes away emptyhanded, disillusioned with everything he had held dear, turning his back on imagination, the urge to elated feelings, and flights of fancy. He feels helpless in the face of uncaring life. 

 

In other words, the boy has come of age to find himself facing the grim, stifling reality of 1900s Dublin, totally unlike the mythical Araby of legend. The ensuing stories are increasingly sad, focused on lost souls going nowhere, alone, literally, emotionally, or both. However, it is clear that the narrator has a limited perspective that the author, Joyce, does not share. Clearly, the narrator's depressed disillusionment and sense of self-loathing are another emotional extreme indicative of the onset of adolescence.

 Epiphany at the Climax

The boy an unnamed narrator who is at the verge of adolescents is in deep love with his Friend Mangan's sister went to Araby market to get a Gift for his beloved however the Market of Araby is nowhere near his imagination and narrator Abruptly has the revelation in the darkness of filthy market of Araby that his feelings for Mangan's sister is just teenage attraction and his idea of love was destroyed. 

Major themes of Araby

COMING OF AGE

One of the central issues in James Joyce’s “Araby” is growing up. The narrator, who is a grown man who uses mature language to describe his youthful experience, reflects back on his experience with the Araby market, providing small insights from an adult perspective. The fact that the story is told from an adult perspective indicates that the story is about growing up: the narrator is reflecting back on a formative time during his Childhood. 

RELIGION AND CATHOLICISM

The narrator of “Araby” is surrounded by religion. He attends a Roman Catholic school and all of the people around him, just like he himself, are steeped in the Catholic religion that held sway in Ireland at the time when the story was set. Joyce does not clearly indicate how strongly the narrator believes in his faith, but Catholicism plays a large role in his upbringing and he often explains things through Catholic ideas. 

THE DESIRE OF ESCAPE

The characters in Dubliners may be citizens of the Irish capital, but many of them long for escape and adventure in other countries. Such longings, however, are never actually realized by the stories’ protagonists. The schoolboy yearning for escape and Wild West excitement in “An Encounter” is relegated to the imagination and to the confines of Dublin, while Eveline’s hopes for a new life in Argentina dissolve on the docks of the city’s river. Little Chandler enviously fantasizes about the London press job of his old friend and his travels to liberal cities like Paris, but the shame he feels about such desires stops him from taking action to pursue similar goals. More often than offering a literal escape from a physical place, the stories tell of opportunities to escape from smaller, more personal restraints. Eveline, for example, seeks release from domestic duties through marriage. In “Two Gallants,” Lenehan wishes to escape his life of schemes, but he cannot take action to do so. Mr. Doran wishes to escape marrying Polly in “A Boarding House,” but he knows he must relent. The impulse to escape from unhappy situations defines Joyce’s Dubliners, as does the inability to actually undertake the process.

THE INTERSECTION OF LIFE AND DEATH

Dubliners opens with “The Sisters,” which explores death and the process of remembering the dead, and closes with “The Dead,” which invokes the quiet calm of snow that covers both the dead and the living. These stories bookend the collection and emphasize its consistent focus on the meeting point between life and death. Encounters between the newly dead and the living, such as in “The Sisters” and “A Painful Case,” explicitly explore this meeting point, showing what kind of aftershocks a death can have for the living. Mr. Duffy, for example, reevaluates his life after learning about Mrs. Sinico’s death in “A Painful Case,” while the narrator of “The Sisters” doesn’t know what to feel upon the death of the priest. In other stories, including “Eveline,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “The Dead,” memories of the dead haunt the living and color every action. In “Ivy Day,” for example, Parnell hovers in the political talk. The dead cast a shadow on the present, drawing attention to the mistakes and failures that people make generation after generation. Such overlap underscores Joyce’s interest in life cycles and their repetition, and also his concern about those “living dead” figures like Maria in “Clay” who move through life with little excitement or emotion except in reaction to everyday snags and delays. The monotony of Dublin life leads Dubliners to live in a suspended state between life and death, in which each person has a pulse but is incapable of profound, life-sustaining action.

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