Araby by James Joyce

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also shows sloth with defining how the train “crept”. In reality, the train most probably went on by its normal pace which he found unbearable due to his restlessness. When he arrived, displayed was the name Araby, which he describes as magical. Almost as if he is comforted by the expectation towards it. Steadily, he soon processes his environment giving him a foul taste in his mouth. Taste that he know too well. That of which he has been chewing for blandly all his life. Something that gets him “Remembering with difficulty” why exactly he had come. He didn’t see the exotic place he once imagined. Everything he was surrounded by was ordinary, regular, dull, all of which he once thought alienating. He realised his “stay was useless”; it was just a mundane event with ordinary people and worn out conversations.

By the end of the story, his epiphany “I saw myself”, is grotesquely described. Utterly defeated, expressing his severe suffering, he was unsuccessful in his hunt for the Holy Grail. He has been defeated by his on self, mocked by his drives. A chalice in which he thought to be pure was had been sailed from the very beginning. The feeling he had for Mangan’s sister had been nothing but a fragment of his creation and imagination; she had been just as soporific as the rest of the people he knew. He has been disillusioned, he clearly see the reflection of how foolish he was and sees himself like we have seen him all along, and that in reality, his infatuated thought about Araby false. “Gazing up into the darkness,” may suggest through the epiphany that our past always comes back to haunts us in some way-shape-or-form. That possibly, only once we see ourselves through our past we become aware. We can reflect upon this with a quote from the poem “The Rainbow” by William Wordsworth, who implies,“ The Child is the Father of Man.”

Throughout the short story, we have seen multitudes of literary techniques which have brought to light by the religious and secular allegory of the boy’s turbulent emotions and experiences. Religious prospecting was necessary due to the biblical significance James Joyce had put to describe, compare and contrast towards the boy and his feelings towards Mangan’s sister and her iconization of the Virgin Mary. Secular prospecting was strategically given towards the character which provided the foundation to analyse him through his development from the outside world giving finesse to the idea of a medieval alternate reality. What we should possibly remember is that, metaphorically speaking, the eye is not satisfied in only seeing and what we see, is only a distraction from the truth. We avoid the truth about ourselves to avoid a painful reality.

Works Cited

Bible. Colorado Springs: ACSI/Purposeful Design Publications, 2011. Print.

Joyce, James. Araby. Trieste: Triestina Carlo Moscheni, 1935. Print.

Wordsworth, William, and Mark L. Reed. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. Print.