Araby Coming Of Age Analysis

Araby by James Joyce is a coming of age story about a boy who is looking for love. He likes this girl and he decides that he will go to a bazaar in Araby that she cannot attend to try and bring something back for her. Despite his efforts, he was met with failure because by the time he got to the bazaar, it was closed and he could not purchase anything for the girl. The Boy, at the end of the story, learns an important lesson about the vanity of life and fleeting feelings for human love that does not always work out. Throughout the story, James Joyce shows the Boy’s motivation to seek love and salvation in a dark and seemingly Godless world through the use light as symbolism of love and salvation. The story begins with a description of the
The reader can better understand that the Boy’s motivation in this story is for love because Joyce uses strong light and darkness symbolism throughout the Boy’s journey. One day, the Boy goes to Mangen’s house to see if he can talk to Mangen’s sister, the girl who he is interested in. When the Boy goes to the house, it is dark outside the only light is the light coming from the house and the streetlamp. Joyce describes this moment starting with Mangen’s sister “she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist…the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and… caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease” (Joyce 124). Joyce literally illuminates the Boy’s main motivation of winning Mangen’s sister’s love by describing her white skin and her petty coat falling the right way. This scene shows how the Boy admired Mangen’s sister. How he paid attention to every minute detail of her appearance. The Boy examines how her pale skin and the border of her dress were white, in this story, Joyce uses Mangen’s sister as a symbol for