He hardly knows the girl, they have not made each other promises. He is delusional, I suppose, both in regard to Araby and the girl to a certain extent. View 2 comments. You know, I think we've all had our own araby. Your career can be your araby, or your marriage, or your first love etc.
What amazes me is how universal the theme of araby is. The juxtaposition between dreams vs reality is certainly spot-on and it acknowledges the reality that our own araby may not be as grand or as beautiful as how we expect it to be when we get there.
If you analyze the story superficially, you may find it cliche, but if you look at the sub-text or the hidden meaning behind the You know, I think we've all had our own araby.
If you analyze the story superficially, you may find it cliche, but if you look at the sub-text or the hidden meaning behind the story, you'd start to see that araby isn't really about a blossoming young love. It's about our pre-conceived notions when it comes to our dreams, and how in reality, things aren't really as perfect as how we expect it to be when we get there and most of the time, we would end up disappointed.
Did I find the message of araby negative? It's pure realism if you ask me and just like with any good work incorporating realism, the scenario may be dark, but the reader is supposed to get something positive out of it.
Araby may have ended on a sad note, but with every end comes a new beginning. I think the purpose of the bleak epiphany, is to efficiently strike the message to the readers. It allows us to understand and acknowledge this sad reality. In my opinion, the author explored the theme in a marvelous and masterful way.
The writing is skillful, the details are spot-on and the characters feel fleshed out even if the story is really short. This might be my all time favorite short story so far. View all 5 comments. Contrasts the dreams and aspirations of young love with the coldness of seemingly hopeless realities. Definitely one to be mulled over though to fully appreciate all that is both written and not written.
I'm game if you are. Time to start reading more of your shorter works! Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. I came upon this in a textbook called The Story and Its Writer aka Mwana's way to complete her readbooks challenge. I have more to say about Joyce than I do about this short story- which is part of the collection Dubliners. I will say it's so goddamn magical, my mind swooned.
The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The narrator is infatuated with a neighbour and he has the reaction I ordinarily have I came upon this in a textbook called The Story and Its Writer aka Mwana's way to complete her readbooks challenge.
The narrator is infatuated with a neighbour and he has the reaction I ordinarily have to money. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. If this is the calibre of the stream of consciousness that he used to create that Odysseus fanfiction, I'm sold.
I will definitely be reading Ulysses next year. Please don't hold me to this. FYI, James Joyce is my patronus. I wanna meet this man's brain and just marinate in it. James Joyce's love letters to Nora. I have never once thought that I would love a text, given to me in English lessons. But this, this is something special. As short as it is, Joyce skilfully paints an ethereal image which is so simple yet, deep, down to its core.
The delicacy of his words in every sentence to the eccentricity and depth of each character, succinctly manifests a thought provoking message by the end. One of, if not the, m But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. One of, if not the, most beautiful short story I've come across. Definitely worth a read. Mm, well that was incredibly boring. I truly felt nothing while reading this short story. I get the point, but I also feel like it could have been much better delivered.
The writing style and descriptions are nice enough, but it takes more than a nice setting and words for me to enjoy a short story. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. A very strange story in my opinion.
Pretty dark in some parts, there are some interesting and redeeming parts but all and all it was just okay. Hang in there. The episode drops August 16, and I think you may, at the very least, find the story is deeper than it seems. Adoration and foolishness mixed together in a short story. He is expecting too much from a girl who is a figment of his imagination. I believe that expectation is the root of all heartaches and this further cemented my belief.
I can see why Araby is adored by the readers. The frustration of first love and adoration. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room.
I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high, cold, empty, gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing.
From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.
When I came downstairs again I found Mrs Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old, garrulous woman, a pawnbroker's widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn't wait any longer, but it was after eight o'clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her.
When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the hall door.
I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.
I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically You've kept him late enough as it is. My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey.
I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly.
It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten.
In front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name. I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girded at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service.
I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. I listened to the fall of the coins. Remembering with difficulty why I had come, I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets.
At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. I heard her. Observing me, 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. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men.
They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder. I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real.
Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. And it was definitely from the book. Though it was an uneasy feeling; any story that can evoke such feeling deserves another star than the 3 I gave it just for the story.
This short story follows a young Irish boy going through his first infatuation. This is a beautiful written story that spoke to me deeply. I personally took away that life will cause you to face hardships, but your hardships mean nothing because in the big World you are just a nameless boy or girl in the vastness of the world.
I really enjoyed this one. I'm definitely going to be looking into other works by Joyce, particularly his short stories. Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to Read. Rate this book. Araby James Joyce. Short Stories Classics Fiction School More Details. James Joyce books 6, followers. James Joyce, Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
James Joyce was born in Dublin, on February 2, , the eldest of ten surviving siblings, two other died of typhoid. His father was John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman, who had failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting.
In spite of their poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class facade. In he entered the University College, Dublin.
It appeared in the Fortnightly Review in At this time he also began writing lyric poems. After graduation in the twenty-year-old Joyce went to Paris, where he worked as a journalist, teacher and in other occupations under difficult financial conditions. He spent a year in France, returning when a telegram arrived saying his mother was dying.
Not long after her death, Joyce was traveling again. He left Dublin in with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid who he married in In Joyce had published a collection of poems, Chamber Music. In March Joyce started in Paris his second major work, Finnegans Wake , suffering at the same time chronic eye troubles caused by glaucoma.
The first segment of the novel appeared in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in April , as part of what Joyce called Work in Progress. The final version was published in Some critics considered the work a masterpiece, though many readers found it incomprehensible. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 30 of reviews. Sean Barrs. And, not only that, the narrator grows from his initial state of ignorance and develops as a person, both intellectually and emotionally in just a few pages.
Previously, all we have had with Victorian literature is a racist representation of the Orient. They saw it as underdeveloped compared to the West, though they also saw it as mystifying and seductive. Joyce is a modernist and he considers the East slightly differently. He loves the idea of her. She tells him she is visiting the circus Araby and he becomes besotted with the idea. He falls in love with the location, a break from his boring life of monotony.
He envisions her as a personification of this eastern seduction and the circus itself becomes an idea, an ideal location that is enchanting and orientalised.
The boy observes this woman, and longs for the idea of her. The circus is not enchanting. How positively progressive!
Well, he is my favourite anyway! Joyce is, certainly, a great writer. Lady Jane. The most prevalent irony in this short story is the contrast between the dreamlike type of love he feels for the young woman, and the reality of his unrealistically high expectations. 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.
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me.
I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love! At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby.
I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar; she said she would love to go. While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings.
She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. 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.
It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. 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.
I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised, and hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle.
I could not call my wandering thoughts together.
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