Araby by James Joyce

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The ending paragraph of the story is where we realize the moral and point of “Araby”. After talking to the lady, the lights go out, and the entire hall goes dark. Here we read the final sentence, in which the boy admits his own personal downfall, and how truly upset he is when he comes to the realization. He says, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce 832). His personal vanity, or the personal pride he thought he would obtain by coming to the bazaar, was ultimately something he could not obtain. He thought coming to Araby would help him find something for the girl, which would help him get her as a friend, and maybe something more. But as the bazaar came to a close, he stared up into the darkness in the hall, and visualized how he felt at that moment. He came all this way, argued with his uncle, and had spent the greater part of his week waiting for it, but as he finally arrived, it was nearly over. He stood there looking up into nothing, thinking about how his vanity drove him to come here, and then as soon as he did come, that same bit of personal pride laughed in his face, and turned off the lights. And as soon as he sees this, his heart fills with pain and fury. He followed his heart to this magical bazaar because he wanted something new, but he didn’t think about why he wanted to go there, he just impulsively did it, without any sort of plan. And because of this mistake, he felt embarrassed to even be there.

The bazaar was not meant for the boy, and Joyce notes this in his descriptions. He makes this extremely apparent through his constant use of the word “darkness”, and its other forms; he notes of the bazaar being dark four separate times in the final passage. The darkness symbolizes the familiar feeling he gets while in his dark alley at home, and it symbolizes everything that he hates; the things that are not new and exciting. Joyce creates this analogy for the boy’s life, noting how it is dominated by darkness. He writes in the third paragraph, “The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses … to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens … to the dark odorous stables …” (Joyce 830). Joyce writes repetitively of the dark as a direct representation of the boy’s life. “If my uncle was seen turning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street” (Joyce 830). The boy plays in the dark, he hides in the dark, and he lives in the dark. The darkness is where he comes to an epiphany, and where he matures as a boy. Joyce uses the darkness to represent the boy’s home, and uses the bazaar to represent the boy’s dream destination (Norris 311). And when the lights go out on the boy at the bazaar, it is clear Joyce believes the boy should not have left his home; because one way or another, he knows home will find a way back to you. The nameless boy’s destiny is in the darkness of Dublin, and Joyce knows there is no escaping this.

The final scene, along with many other key moments in the story, show how naïve and immature the boy acted through all of this. He let his heart overtake his mind and allowed his body to act on it, and only expected the good out of it. The boy quickly learned that his vanity in how the girl viewed him was something that would be his downfall, and his failed journey to Araby is proof of this. But also, we learn of this idea that Joyce promotes, where the concept of home will always follow us in some form. The darkness followed the boy wherever he went, and it was in the darkness that he finally saw his tragedy. This analogy closes the story, reminding us that sometimes you can’t escape what is familiar to you. Joyce ultimately writes this with the intention of showing us that one boy can lose his dignity because his heart wants something badly, and his brain won’t dare to question it.

Works Cited

Coulthard, A. R. "Joyce's Araby." The Explicator 52.2 (1994): 97-99. ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2016.

Joyce, James. "Araby." Literature for Composition: An Introduction to Literature. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. 10th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. 214. Print. 23 Apr. 2016.

Norris, Margot. "Blind Streets And Seeing Houses: Araby's Dim Glass Revisited." Studies In Short Fiction 32.3 (1995): 309-18. ProQuest. Web. 23 Apr. 2016.