‘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.

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. 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 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). Each of these works represents a
development from the last, with Joyce’s writing becoming increasingly
experimental, obscure, and challenging.

Like his fellow countryman, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, Joyce writes
about the country he knew so well: Ireland, the country of his birth. But
unlike Yeats, Joyce had no time for the romantic vision of Ireland
encapsulated by the Celtic Twilight. Joyce said that he wrote the short
stories that make up Dubliners in order to give Ireland one good look at
itself in the mirror: his vision of Ireland is an unflinchingly realist ‘warts
and all’ depiction of a country which, especially in those early works,
seems gripped by a paralysis (a key word for Dubliners) that is partly a
result of the country’s obsession with its own past and with Catholicism.
It’s telling that Joyce spent much of his adult life living outside of his
native Ireland, on the Continent, where he could absorb French literary
influences which would be so important for his development as a
novelist.