araby thesis statement

A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Araby’ is one of the early stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners , the 1914 collection of short stories which is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature. At the time, sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).

And yet ‘Araby’ shows just what might have initially baffled readers coming to James Joyce’s fiction for the first time, and what marked him out as a brilliant new writer.

But before we get to an analysis of ‘Araby’ (which can be read here ), a brief summary of the story’s plot – what little ‘plot’ there is. You can read the story here .

Plot summary

In summary, then: ‘Araby’ is narrated by a young boy, who describes the Dublin street where he lives. As the story progresses, the narrator realises that he has feelings for his neighbour’s sister and watches her from his house, daydreaming about her, wondering if she will ever speak to him. When they eventually talk, she suggests that he visit a bazaar, Araby, on her behalf as she cannot go herself.

The boy plans to buy her a present while at Araby, but he arrives late to the bazaar and, disappointed to find that most of the stalls are packing up, ends up buying nothing.

‘Araby’ is marked by dead-ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere. The street on which the young narrator lives, North Richmond Street, is ‘blind’: i.e. a cul-de-sac or dead-end street. The narrator does go to the bazaar, Araby, but ends up turning up too late and doesn’t buy anything. His feelings for his female neighbour don’t lead anywhere: this is a romantic story in which boy and girl do not get together. Disappointments, dead ends, everywhere.

Like many of the stories in Dubliners , ‘Araby’ is marked, then, by plotlessness, by ordinariness, by describing mood and setting over action or exciting plot developments. As with the other early tales in Dubliners , ‘Araby’ is narrated in the first person by its principal character.

Joyce arranged the 15 stories in Dubliners so that they move from childhood to late middle age, progressing through the human life span more or less chronologically.

We might ask what advantage the child’s-eye view here creates. Like the narrator of the opening story from the collection, ‘The Sisters’ , the narrator of ‘Araby’ lives with his aunt and uncle. (Where are the parents? Have they emigrated, leaving the children to be looked after by relatives while they go to America in search of money and a better life? Have they died?)

But he is our voice through the story, and the other characters – with the notable exception of the girl he is infatuated with – are kept at arm’s length. There is a simplicity and innocence to his voice, describing what it feels like to experience the pangs of first love, but there is also a knowing voice at work too.

One of the most remarkable things about ‘Araby’, and one which deserves closer analysis, is the style. Style is, in a sense, everything with James Joyce: every word is used with care and towards the creation of a very deliberate effect, and no two stories in Dubliners use quite the same style or for identical reasons.

As the critic Margot Norris has observed in an analysis of ‘Araby’, the narrator describes his disappointments (failing to talk to the girl he likes at first; then, once he has spoken to her, failing to get her a gift at the Araby bazaar) in such a way as to compensate for the frustrations of real life by offering, in their place, the beauty of language.

This is there in the exoticism of the story’s title, ‘Araby’, and what it describes, a bazaar: both ‘Araby’ and ‘bazaar’ being terms which conjure the otherness and excitement of the place (based on a real travelling bazaar named Araby, which visited Dublin in 1894), in stark contrast to the more usual English-language term, ‘market’. (Note how the narrator refers to his aunt going ‘marketing’ at one point: ‘marketing’ is what people do when they need to perform household chores like shopping for groceries; but going to Araby or the bazaar is an event, a treat.)

Consider, in this connection, the narrator’s description of the impact seeing his beautiful neighbour has on him:

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

This has a peculiar effect on him:

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.

This is a true but also heightened in its romanticism: true because it captures what it is to be in love with a special person, especially when in the first flushes of adolescence.

But it is also romantic in the extreme because of the religious and courtly idea (nay, ideal) of love present in that idea of being the girl’s cupbearer (‘I bore my chalice’), the crying (but then, the disarmingly direct parenthetical admission of not knowing why), and the romantic idea of Old Ireland inscribed in that harp, which also carries a frisson of the erotic (with the girl’s words and gestures acting like the finger’s touches all over the boy’s body).

There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories which repay close analysis for the way the young narrator romanticises, but does not sentimentalise, the feeling of being in love, perhaps hopelessly. ‘Araby’, then, is a story about frustration and failure, but it ends on a note of ‘anguish and anger’, without telling us what will befall the narrator and the girl who haunts his dreams. Like many a modernist story, it is open-ended even when, like the street where the narrator lives, it appears to have reached its dead end.

About James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. His reputation largely rests on just four works: a short story collection Dubliners (1914), and three novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

For more discussion of James Joyce, see our analysis of Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’ , our commentary on ‘The Sisters’ , our summary of ‘Clay’ , and our introduction to free indirect speech .

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’”

• Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce's 'Araby' | collect magazine

The effect of reading Dubliners as a very young man has never left me. The ‘plotlessness’ of the stories, at the time, left me bewildered, but over the years I came to admire the style and indeed to prefer it to tacky ‘sting-in-the-tale’ or moralistic stories. my own collection of short stories is highly influenced by Joyce’s collection though not every story is plotless and, it goes without saying, my writing is a pale reflection of this great Irishman’s work. Thanks to your posts I’ve ordered the book (I think I read my brother’s copy all those decades ago) and I’m looking forward to reading it again and writing about my thoughts!

Hi – nice commentary on Araby which I’ve loved reading as part of The Dubliners several times. Interesting the way you’ve hit on the “dead ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere.” I don’t think I ever noticed that.

I did notice the boy was almost paralyzed about doing anything about the up-scale girl – like other characters in other stories – like Dubliners in Ireland at the time.

I noticed the windows in almost every story with the characters either looking out at what they want or in at it, but not being where what they want is. (Pastries in another early story but elsewhere.) Sometimes there aren’t even any windows and the players are really trapped in their views (politics, religion). It’s the same theme, desire and frustration. There are so many ways to read these stories by Joyce – things to find, to interpret, to see. https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com/012011-2/2012-2/102012-2/dubliners/

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Home › British Literature › Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 6, 2022

One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners , which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its predecessors, “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” “Araby” tells the story of an unfortunate fall from innocence, as a young boy comes to recognize the sorry state of the world in which he lives. On the whole, Joyce’s home city is not kindly portrayed in these stories; he set out in Dubliners to produce what he called “a moral history of my country,” with a particular focus on the supposed “centre of paralysis,” Dublin itself. “Araby” and the other stories of Dublin’s youth are tales of initiation into this gray world.

As is the case with most of the stories in Dubliners, “Araby” takes its inspiration from remembered fragments of the author’s own childhood, including the Joyce family’s sometime residence on Dublin’s North Richmond Street, the Christian Brothers’ School that Joyce and some of his siblings briefly attended, and the “Araby” bazaar that passed through the city in May, 1894, when Joyce would have been 12 years old. Yet although Joyce’s life is deeply woven into his art, neither “Araby” nor any of his other works are merely autobiographical. These remembered elements come together in a story of a young boy in the intense grip of his first love, who imagines himself dispatched on a romantic quest by his beloved, only to realize in the end that his romantic notions were the naive fantasies of a child.

The dismal state of Joyce’s Dublin is suggested in part by the gloomy atmosphere of the story. We are twice reminded in the opening moments that North Richmond Street is “blind.” At its dead end is an empty house, and along one side is a school whose description likens it to a prison. The “brown imperturbable faces” of the other houses suggest a neighborhood of pious moralists keeping each other under constant surveillance. The young boy’s own home is redolent of a past that persists in a stale and unpleasant form: The “air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms.” The house’s former tenant, a priest who passed away there, has left numerous uninspiring reminders of himself, from the rusty bicycle pump in the garden to the “old useless papers” scattered about the place. The narrator hints that the old man was at home among the street’s “brown imperturbable faces” when he tells us that the supposedly charitable old man left all of his money to unspecified “institutions” and only the furniture of his house to his sister.

“Araby” is set in the short days of winter, whose cold and dark further underscore its gloomy atmosphere. Throughout, light contends weakly with an encroaching darkness. The boys’ evening play takes place among houses “grown sombre” and beneath a violet sky toward which “the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns.” As the boy arrives at the nearly empty bazaar in the story’s closing moments, the lights are turned off in the gallery of the hall, leaving him “gazing up into the darkness.” Amid the persistent gloom, however, stands the radiant object of the boy’s devotion, Mangan’s sister, “her figure defined by the light.”

The young boy’s ability to see dazzling light in the midst of overwhelming darkness is a function of the romantic idealism that is gradually stripped from him by his decidedly unromantic world. Even the scattered leavings of the dead priest, which include Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance The Abbot , together with the memoirs of the adventurous criminal-turned-detective, Eug ne Fran ois Vidocq, afford him fuel for his romantic imagination. Until the story reaches its sad conclusion, the boy is able to keep the darkness at bay, running happily through the darkened street with his young friends and transforming the clamor of the market on a Saturday evening into the backdrop for his imagined knight’s quest. There he imagines “that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”; however, the boy’s adventure-story version of his world is challenged by the songs of the street singers, with their allusions to O’Donovan Rossa and other reminders of “troubles in our native land.” The boy imagines his adventurous life despite the political troubles whose effects are felt and sung all around him. For a while, he imagines himself able to transcend such concerns and inhabit a thrilling realm of heroism and perfect love.

However, in the end his world will not sustain these happy illusions. The name of the Araby bazaar promises an Eastern exoticism entirely absent from the tawdry affair he finally experiences. Having imagined himself a questing knight, the boy encounters in Araby his Chapel Perilous, a defiled temple where “two men were counting money on a salver,” and his heroic selfimage crumbles during his encounter with the young woman at the stall he visits, who clearly regards him as a young nuisance. He witnesses in the flirtatious but shallow exchange between the young woman and the two gentleman a version of love considerably less operatic than the devotion that brought him to Araby, and he comes to see himself as a much smaller being than the gallant hero who undertook a sacred quest for his beloved, regarding himself in the final moment “as a creature driven and derided by vanity.”

In recounting the boy’s journey from passionate innocence to jaded cynicism, Joyce employs a narrative technique that is subtle but effective. The story is told from a first-person retrospective point of view that enables us to perceive two distinct but intimately related voices in the narration: that of the devoted young boy able to imagine himself a knight-errant “in places the most hostile to romance” and that of the subdued older man, recalling his younger self with an ironic detachment born of disappointment. The narration brings us inside the mind of the youthful lover, perplexed and overwhelmed by emotions that he can interpret only in the languages he knows: that of religious devotion and the stories of adventure and romance. Throughout, though, we are reminded that the young boy’s “confused adoration” is being recalled by his older and sadly unconfused self. The gloomy opening description of North Richmond Street, with its houses “conscious of decent lives within them,” gazing at each other “with brown imperturbable faces,” clearly reflects the perspective of the older man rather than that of the boy who careened through the same street in play. And the explicit judgment in the narrator’s recollection that “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood ” (emphasis mine) reflects an ironic self-perception that the young boy does not at that moment have. These two voices eventually converge in “Araby” ’s closing paragraph, when the narrator declares, “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” revealing the origin of that ironic perspective in the moment of his sad fall from romance to cynicism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin USA, 1996.

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Analysis of “Araby” by James Joyce Essay

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Araby, by James Joyce, is the story of a young boy from a humble background, experiencing the first flush of love. When the object of her affection, “Mangan’s sister” expresses her desire to go to Araby , and her inability to go there, he gallantly offers to get something for her. His feelings for “Mangan’s sister” and his desire to go to Araby for her sake form the core of the story.

The opening paragraphs tell us about the narrator’s background as it paints a dark and dreary picture of his neighborhood. The reference to the fact that the priest who lived in the house before them had left the furniture of the house to his sister, suggests that the family could have used the furniture had it been available. There are several other references to the humble background of the narrator as he talks about the neighborhood in which he played which had ‘dark dripping gardens” and “odors arose from ashpits”.

From here the narrative moves on to the narrator’s infatuation with “Mangan’s sister”. The narrator and his friends are young boys who still find enjoyment in playing around in the dirt and filth of the neighborhood and the harsh realities of life have still not touched them. But obviously, they are growing up and becoming aware of their surroundings as well as their sexuality. “Mangan’s sister” is probably the only girl with whom he had ever exchanged “a few casual words”. So, as the narrator is outgrowing his boyhood and entering his adolescence, it is natural that his first crush would be on the only girl who has as yet entered his consciousness. His various emotions and actions, like following her at a distance to imagining her in the weirdest of places, only further intensify his infatuation as he is unable to express his feelings. The boyishness of his emotions is betrayed when he resorts to prayer to get her to talk to him.

Mangan’s sister’s first interaction with the narrator introduces us to the bazaar called Araby . When she expresses her strong desire to go to the bazaar and her inability to go there, the narrator takes it upon himself to go there and buy a gift for her. The focus of the story now shifts to the narrator’s obsession with going to Araby . Here once again we see the boyishness of the narrator’s character. Until now we had seen his obsession with Mangan’s sister and how he could only think of her. But now this obsession and focus shift to Araby . This boyishness of the narrator must be noted since as the story progresses we see him getting disillusioned.

After the narrator had carefully planned his evening out to Araby, the delay in his uncle’s return from work temporarily brings uncertainty to his plans. However, his aunt allows him to go alone to Araby, even at the late hour. Until now, the narrator had a very exotic impression of Araby. The fact that his uncle is reminded of the poem “ The Arab Farewell to his Steed” when the narrator mentions Araby , suggests that he thought that the bazaar was an Arab bazaar. Even the word “bazaar” is an Arab word and even the reader is misled into thinking that Araby is some kind of exotic marketplace. However, when he reaches the bazaar, he is disillusioned by what he sees. It is just an ordinary bazaar and a very expensive one at that. He has to pay a shilling just to get in and with what remains, he realizes that he cannot afford anything for Magnan’s sister. Thus the climax turns out to be an anti-climax, as the narrator’s dreams are blown away and he is reminded of his humble background.

This short story is told in the first person, entirely from the narrator’s point-of-view, hence we have a very limited understanding of the proceedings. A large part of the story is devoted to the narrator’s fantasies, first with “Magnan’s sister” and later with Araby . The narrative turns out to be a journey of self-discovery, as the young boy, probably for the first time, comes face to face with his financial standing and realizes the vanity of love.

Even though the narrator has to go to Araby to realize his financial realities, he was all along aware of it at some level. His preference for the book with “yellow leaves” and finding the “rusty bicycle-pump”, all point to his subconscious awareness of his family’s financial condition. Also, he does not have big dreams, his biggest wish is getting the love of his friend’s sister. He hopes to win this love through the simple gesture of buying her a gift from a bazaar where she wishes to go. His realization that even such simple pleasures are not from people coming from his socio-economic background is the crux of the story. This simple tale tells the readers about the harsh lives of the Dubliners by pointing out that for these people even love was a luxury.

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Araby by James Joyce: Analysis

In his early story “Araby,” James Joyce prefigures many, if not all, of the themes which later became the focus of his writing. Joyce, often considered the greatest English-language novelist of the twentieth century, published few books in his lifetime. Chamber Music, a book of poems, appeared in 1907; Dubliners, a collection of short stories from which “Araby” is taken, was published in 1914; and hi first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, came out in the same year. The book for which Joyce is most famous, Ulysses, appeared in 192 and was quickly banned. Finally, in 1939, Joyce published Finnegans Wake. Notwithstanding his small output, Joyce’s work has been highly influential, and many of the themes and details he uses in his work have become common currency in English literature. In “Araby,” a story of a young boy’s disillusionment, Joyce explores questions of nationality, religion, popular culture, art, and relationships between the sexes. None of these themes can be adequately explored in a short essay; however, a brief exposition of the most important themes of “Araby” indicates the marvelous complexity of Joyce’s insight. 

“Araby” is narrated by a young boy who is, like most of Joyce’s characters, a native of Dublin, Ireland. Since the conflict in the story occurs primarily within the boy’s consciousness, Joyce’s choice of first-person narration is crucial. The protagonist, as with most of Joyce’s main characters, is a sensitive boy, searching for principles with which to make sense of the chaos and banality of the world. We know immediately that Catholicism has served as one of these principles; he attends a Christian Brothers school and at home is attracted to the library of a former tenant of his family, a priest. His identification with Catholicism is more than casual. On Saturday evenings, when the boy goes “marketing” with his aunt he sees the crowds in the market as a”throng of foes” and himself as a religious hero who “bears his chalice” through the crowd. 

The narrator’s dedication to Catholicism, however, does not run as deep as he might believe. In fact, he channels the emotional devotion that his religion requires towards questionable recipients. Readers learn first that the priest’s library contains three books especially important to the protagonist: a romantic novel, a religious tract written by a Protestant, and the memoirs of a French police agent and master of disguise. If this priest does not maintain a sufficiently pious library, how can this boy be expected to properly practice his religion? 

More importantly, the boy takes the Catholic idea of devotion to the Virgin Mary and finds a real-world substitute for the Mother of God. We learn that he is especially fascinated by the older sister of one of his schoolmates. In the narrator’s first description of Mangan’s sister she is lit from behind, like a saint. “[H]er figure defined by the light from the half-opened door… . Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door,” the narrator tells us, presenting an image of himself as a prostrate worshipper. Furthermore, he relates that”her image accompanied [him] even in places the most hostile to romance.” Although the boy explains his feelings for Mangan’s sister as romantic, his confusion between her and the Virgin Mary are easily discernible:”Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises of which I myself did not understand.” The boy is as rapturous as if he had seen a vision of the Mother of God herself. And when the girl finally speaks to him, he cannot respond coherently: “When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer.” 

Joyce also makes the nonreligious, and even sexual, elements of the boy’s devotion to Mangan’s sister clear throughout the story. Her dress, her hair, and her “brown figure” are “always in [the narrator’s] eye,” and when he finally speaks to her, the same light that once made her glow like a saint now catches “the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.” The boy melds religious devotion for the Virgin with his own romantic longing, and the combined force is powerful. When Mangan’s sister asks him if he will be attending Araby, a church bazaar to be held soon, he is caught by surprise: “I forgot whether I answered yes or no.” She tells him she must attend a retreat and cannot attend the fair. As his eyes fix upon the silver bracelet she twists on her wrist, he resolves to go and bring her back something that could compare with that bracelet. Here, the narrator ventures dangerously close to idolatry and the pre-Christian tradition of offerings to the gods. In a punning reference to this, he relates that because of his recent distraction in class, his schoolmaster “hoped I was not beginning to idle.” 

The shift from the boy’s initially religious longings to more worldly concerns is accentuated by images of Araby that reverberate in his mind, taking on a very unreligious cast: ‘ “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.” This is a very ominous sentence; the boy’s religious leanings are being completely overthrown by the lure of the mysterious, and possibly sensual, bazaar. The sensuality that he wished to obliterate earlier (“All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves,” he tells us when he is in the priest’s room, thinking of Mangan’s sister) is now the very thing that he wants to indulge. The fact that Araby suggests a nonChristian culture is also significant here, for in his dedication to Mangan’s sister the boy is willing to forsake the safe and familiar world of Catholic Ireland for what he believes to be the exotic and decadent East. As he stands in the upper-story room of his house, he looks upon his old playmates from above as they play in the street, and then looks up on the house across to where Mangan and his sister live. He feels himself chosen, like Sir Galahad (a noble knight from the legend of King Arthur) and prepares himself for his quest. 

After withstanding the peril of the drunken uncle and the aunt who hints he might have to “put off [his] bazaar for this night of Our Lord,” the protagonist is finally ready to embark upon his quest. His excitement is palpable as he rushes towards the festival, trying to get there before it closes. As he approaches the darkening hall, his once-clear purpose is now muddy: he “rememberfs] with difficulty why [he] had come.” The futility and purposelessness of his project begins to dawn upon him as he hears an English shop-girl and two young English gentlemen chatting: 

“O, I never said such a thing!” 

“O, but you did!” 

“O, but I didn’t!” 

“Didn’t she say that?” 

“Yes. I heard her.” 

“O, there’s a. ..fib!” 

One of the recurring themes in Joyce’s stories is the “epiphany,” a Greek word meaning “revelation.” In one of the drafts of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s character Stephen Dedalus is preoccupied by epiphanies: “By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase or the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” Joyce, like his fictional counterpart Stephen, saw the epiphany as a crucial building-block of fiction, because it was the moment at which a character understands that the illusions under which he or she has been operating are false and misleading. 

At this point in “Araby,” the narrator experiences an epiphany. As the protagonist nears the end of his quest and is about to buy a gift for Mangan’s sister, he changes his mind. As he leaves the hall where the bazaar is closing down, the narrator says: “[glazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Somehow, the overheard conversation between the English shopgirl and her friends has changed his outlook. 

Here at the end of the story, the various symbols Joyce employs converge. The light in which the narrator has always seen Mangan’s sister now meets the darkness of the hall as the bazaar shuts down. Our narrator begins to see Mangan’ s sister not as the image of the Virgin, but as a mundane English shopgirl engaging in idle conversation. His quest, he now realizes, was misconceived in the first place, and he now recognizes the mistake of joining his religious fervor with his romantic passion for Mangan’s sister. Although he does not say, it seems clear that the protagonist will fully reject both. 

The story, like much of his work, is taken almost directly from Joyce’s own life. Like the narrator of this story, Joyce lived on North Richmond Street in Dublin and attended the Christian Brothers’ School. The aunt and the uncle of “Araby” bear some resemblance to Joyce’s own parents. Even Araby is factual: advertisements survive that date the bazaar to May, 1894. 

In Joyce’s later fiction, characters almost identical to the narrator in “Araby” recur; the most prominent is Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and one of the main characters in Ulysses. Both wrestle with a similar predicament—they must free themselves from the “nets” of their society, family, and religion in order to be entirely self-determined. Although many of the characters in Dubliners prefigure Joyce’s later characters, the boy in “Araby” seems closest to being a younger version of Stephen Dedalus/James Joyce. He goes through almost the same struggle as Joyce shows Stephen fighting in Portrait. In the words of the critic Harry Stone, in The Antioch Review, “‘Araby’ is a portrait of the artist as a young boy.” 

Source Credits:

Kathleen Wilson (Editor), Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1, James Joyce, Published by Gale, 1997.

Greg Barnhisel, for Short Stones for Students, Gale Research, 1997.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — James Joyce — Literary Analysis Of ‘Araby’ By James Joyce

Literary Analysis of 'Araby' by James Joyce

• Categories: Araby James Joyce

About this sample

Words: 625 |

Published: Apr 11, 2022

Words: 625 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Joyce, James. “Araby.” Literary Cavalcade, vol. 52, no. 6, Mar. 2000, p. 21. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.macewan.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=2813357&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “araby”.

“Araby” is a short story by Irish writer James Joyce. The story is a part of Joyce’s renowned Dubliners collection, first published in 1914, which portrays daily life in the Irish city of Dublin in the early 20th century. In “Araby,” a young boy falls in love with his friend’s sister and attempts to purchase her a gift from the Araby Bazaar. The short story has been adapted as a song and a short film. This guide uses an eBook copy of the 2004 Barnes & Noble edition of Dubliners.

The unnamed narrator of the story is a child who lives in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century. He lives on a quiet, dead end street on which a number of brown houses flank a Christian Brother’s school. The narrator attends the school while living with his uncle and aunt in one of the homes on North Richmond Street. The person who previously lived in the house left behind a number of possessions and the narrator takes pleasure in searching through these items to piece together the man’s life. He knows that the former tenant was a priest who died in the drawing-room at the rear of the house.

On dark winter nights, the narrator plays on the street . He plays with his friends until their bodies are glowing in the cold air. Eventually, an older sister of Mangan—one of the narrator’s friends—calls out and brings an end to their games. During one of the nights playing on the street, the narrator begins to see Mangan’s sister differently. He develops romantic feelings for her.

Over time, the narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with his friend’s sister. He thinks about her all day. While at the chaotic, loud market in Dublin, he escapes from the noise by thinking about Mangan’s sister. He imagines freeing himself from the market by carrying her through the thick throng of people as though he were a heroic figure. However, the narrator never talks to Mangan’s sister. Instead, he courts her in his imagination.

One day, Mangan’s sister unexpectedly strikes up a conversation with the narrator and asks him whether he plans to go to a local market known as Araby’s Bazaar. The bazaar is a church market famous for selling products from the Middle and Far East. The narrator listens as the girl explains that she would love to attend the market but cannot do so because the nuns who run her school are taking part in a religious retreat. The narrator, hoping to impress the object of his affections, promises to go to Araby’s Bazaar and purchase something on her behalf.

The narrator’s daydreams take on a new dimension. He imagines the items he will buy for Mangan’s sister from Araby’s Bazaar. He pictures the market clearly in his mind. All the daydreaming has an impact on the narrator’s schoolwork. His teacher becomes frustrated that the narrator is not focusing on his important lessons. Even though the narrator knows that his teacher is becoming angry, he cannot help but imagine the bazaar.

When Saturday morning arrives, the narrator reminds his uncle of his desire to go to Araby’s Bazaar. His uncle goes out for the day and, when the narrator sits down for dinner, his uncle has still not returned. As the narrator becomes increasingly anxious, his uncle finally returns home at around nine o’clock in the evening. Judging from the way his uncle walks, the narrator knows that his uncle has been drinking in the local pub. The narrator watches his uncle eat dinner and, as the man is halfway through his meal, the narrator asks for money to visit the bazaar. The uncle has already forgotten his nephew’s request. He tries to dissuade the narrator from the idea. However, the narrator’s aunt tells her husband to give their nephew money to visit the bazaar. Apologetically, the uncle gives money to the narrator and recites a famous poem about an Arab man who tries to sell a horse but decides that he loves the horse too much.

The narrator rushes from the house with a florin coin in his hand. He rides the train to Araby’s Bazaar and arrives 10 minutes before it closes. The bazaar is quiet, and the narrator nervously enters. He passes stalls selling tea sets and stalls selling vases. He sees two Englishmen flirting with a young female shopkeeper. When the young woman asks the narrator whether he wants to buy something, he knows that she is simply being polite to him. He declines her offer and allows her to return to her conversation, though she watches him carefully over her shoulder. As the market closes, the narrator realizes that his entire trip has been a vain pursuit. He stands in the dark and reflects on his actions, feeling anguished and angry at what he has allowed himself to become. 

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Orientalism in James Joyce's "Araby"

Submitting Student(s)

Lucas C. Townsend , Winthrop University Follow

College of Arts and Sciences

Faculty Mentor

Amanda Hiner, Ph.D.

This critical essay analyzes James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” and the elements of Orientalism (a strain of postcolonial theory) within. While most critics focus on the text’s function as a bildungsroman or the narrator’s ephiphany, few pieces of scholarship exist regarding the overt focus on the Oriental within “Araby.” The story’s inherent imperial-minded descriptions of an exoticised bazaar are commonly glossed over in these few articles; one cannot pass off the strain of Middle Eastern imagery, characterization, and Othering integrated into the story simply as an attempt to create a place of wonder and mystery. Joyce’s Orientalist diction and construction of the story result in the revelation of a latent imperial psychology behind his penmanship. European citizens, despite their best intentions, expose their subliminally indoctrinated colonial agendas through their work, by depicting the fantastical, the magical, or the dangerous as lesser people, objects, or events originating from what Edward Said dubs “The Orient” in his landmark text Orientalism . Said’s list of what categorizes the Orient fits the narrative of Joyce’s “Araby” perfectly, as both romance and anger – basic, primal emotions of the savage places of the Earth – haunt both the Araby bazaar the boy’s psyche. This hypocritical way of viewing millions of people and hundreds of culture groups as both romantic and abhorrent stems from the imperial fascination of white Europeans and Americans from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, granting them what they believe is the justification to colonize and exploit a “lesser” people.

Course Assignment

ENGL 203 – Hiner

21-4-2017 1:45 PM

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