James Joyce's Araby: Analysis

Araby: Dream and Reality
Ahsan Habib

James Joyce’s “Araby” deals mainly with a young boy’s psychic journey from first love to despair and disappointment and also with his discovery of the discrepancy between dream and reality. In the story, an unnamed boy who lives with his uncle and aunt in the midst of an unfavourable situation for love and affection falls in love with a girl. Finally, he realizes that love and life differ from dream.

Throughout the story the boy seems to be in a world that is inimical to ideals and dreams. The story opens with an account of North Richmond Street, a ‘blind’ and ‘quiet’ street where the houses “gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” It is a street of fixed, decaying conformity and false piety. The house in which the boy along with his uncle and aunt start living was a house where a priest lived in the past. The priest died in the back room of the house. The boy found several old yellowed books which he enjoys leafing through. He also found a bicycle pump rusting in the back yard. All these things become symbols of the intellectual and religious vitality of the past. The boy, in the midst of such decay and spiritual paralysis, experiences the confused idealism and dreams.

The boy, despite discouraging surroundings, experiences the ecstasy and pain of his first love. Every morning before school the boy lies on the floor in the front parlor peeking out through a crack in the blind of the door, watching and waiting for the girl next door to emerge from her house and walk to school. He is shy and still boyish. He follows her, walks silently past, not daring to speak. In his mind she is both a saint to be worshipped and a woman to be desired. His eyes are “often full of tears” and one evening he goes to the back room where the priest had died. Clasping the palms of his hands together, he murmurs, “O love! O love” in a prayer not God, but to the concept of love and perhaps even to the girl, his love. Walking with his aunt to shop on Saturday evenings he imagines that the girl’s image accompanies him, and he protects her in “places the most hostile to romance”. But he is unable to talk to the girl. He keeps himself away from his schoolmates’ boyish games. In this way, his feeling of love for the girl flourishes through hostile situation.

Finally, the girl speaks to the boy. She asks if he is going to Araby. He replies that if he goes, he will bring a gift for her. And from that moment he cannot sleep or study. The word Araby “cast an Eastern enchantment” over him. And then on the night he is to go to the bazaar his uncle neglects to return home. Neither the aunt nor the uncle understands the boy’s need and anguish, and thus his isolation is deepened.

The second part of the story depicts the boy’s inevitable disappointment and realization. The boy arrives too late at the bazaar. It is closing and the hall is in “darkness”. He recognizes “a silence like that which pervades a church after a service” and the bazaar is dirty and disappointing. Two men are “counting money on a salver” and he listens “to the fall of the coins.” A young lady, bored with him and interested in two men who are flirting with her, cheapens and destroys the boy’s sense of an “Eastern enchantment.” The boy senses the falsity of his dreams and his eyes burn “with anguish and anger.”
His love, like his quest for a gift to draw the girl to him in an unfriendly world, ends with his realization that love existed only in mind.

Thus, in the story a portrait of the world that defies ideal and the dream, the boy fully realizes the incompatibility between the beautiful and innocent world of imagination and the very real world of fact.