College of Education, Arts, and Sciences

Katapatan Homes, Banay-Banay, City of Cabuyao

Student Name: Balgua, Dearborn Coleen C. Date: November 2, 2022

Course Year & Section: 3SEDE-B Professor: Doc. Angel Espedido

CRITIQUE PAPER ON THE ARABY BY JAMES JOYCE

"Araby" is a coming-of-age story, which depicts a young person maturing throughout the narrative. Coming-of-age tales are also
known as bildungsroman or initiation tales. The narrator of "Araby" learns the distinction between physical attraction and love, which is
an important lesson on his journey to adulthood. 'Araby,' is a short story by James Joyce, a young boy in Ireland falls in love with the girl
who lives across the street. When the young girl expresses her desire to attend a particular bazaar, he sees an opportunity to win her
heart by attending the bazaar himself and bringing her a gift. The narrator enjoys the moment when the sister comes to the front of their
house to call the brother. The narrator in this story describes events after they have occurred, allowing him to reflect on his feelings of
shame when he realizes he does not love Mangan's sister. He doesn't yet understand what love is, mistaking physical desire for it.

The story of "Araby" is deeply rooted in Joyce's personal history. When he was younger, his family lived in a Dublin suburb, and
in 1894, the Joyces lived on North Richmond Street, just like the narrator. During that year, Joyce visited the Araby bazaar, which was a
popular attraction in Dublin during the nineteenth century. Other allusions to Protestants and Freemasons reflect Irish attitudes toward
these groups at the time. It is one of fifteen stories published in James Joyce's first book of fiction, Dubliners (1914). Each story stands
alone, but they are all linked by the setting of early twentieth-century Dublin (Ireland), and they progress thematically from childhood
innocence to age, helplessness, and disillusionment. Aside from its distinctive structure, Dubliners was notable for the realism with which
it depicted Dublin and urban life in general. The style is one of the most remarkable aspects of 'Araby,' and it deserves closer examination.
In a sense, style is everything with James Joyce: every word is chosen with care and with the intention of creating a very deliberate effect,
and no two stories in Dubliners use the same style or for the same reasons. Childhood is regarded as a carefree time in many cultures,
with none of the worries and constraints of the "real world." In "Araby," Joyce presents a story in which the central themes are frustration,
the longing for adventure and escape, and the awakening and confusing passion experienced by a boy on the verge of adulthood.

There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories that merit close examination for the way the young narrator
idealizes, but does not sentimentalize, 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 happen to the narrator and the girl who haunts his dreams.
Joyce employs a subtle but effective narrative technique. The narrative is told in the first-person review, allowing us to hear two distinct
but intimately related voices: that of the devoted young boy, able to imagine himself a knight-errant "in places most hostile to romance,"
and that of the subdued older man, recalling his younger self with an ironic detachment born of disappointment. The narration takes us
inside the mind of the young lover, who is puzzled and overwhelmed by emotions that he can only express in the languages he
understands: religious devotion and adventure and romance stories. Throughout, we're reminded that the young boy's "confused
adoration" is being remembered by his older, sadly unconfused self. He associates his experience with blindness with his childishness.
He recalls the girl's name, for example, as "a summons to all my foolish blood," and claims that his passionate feelings for her "waste my
waking and sleeping." Joyce clearly conveys the existence of a gap between the ideal and the real by using this narration style.

SELF-LEARNING ACTIVITY IN SEM 115 Page 1 of 3

1st Semester A.Y. 2022-2023
 College of Education, Arts, and Sciences
Katapatan Homes, Banay-Banay, City of Cabuyao

The boy's experiences in James Joyce's "Araby" show how the author employs dark and obscure references to make the boy's
reality of living in the bleak town more vivid. He creates a mood or atmosphere by using dark and gloomy references, then switches to
bright light references when discussing Mangan's sister. The setting, the characterization of the boy, and his point of view as the narrator
all contribute to the story's theme. James Joyce's story begins at dusk and continues into the evening in Araby, Ireland, during the winter.
The boy's character is revealed obliquely in the short story's opening setting. He grew up in the ruins of a vanished city. Symbolic images
depict him as a person who recognizes that the vivacity of his city has faded, leaving only empty piety, the faintest echo of passion, and
merely symbolic reminiscences of a vigorous concern for people and God. Despite his inability to comprehend this rationally, the young
boy believes that the street, the city, and Ireland have become dull and self-satisfied. Because it is a world of religious stagnation, the
boy's perspective is very limited. He is unaware and thus uninformed. The boy is young and naive, and his life is dull and boring. Joyce
employs darkness to enhance the boy's reality through more vivid, precise descriptions. The Narrator continues to struggle with love and
lives in his own fantasy rather than the reality depicted in the theme. When the narrator meets the girl and they talk about the bazaar, the
bazaar symbolizes his love for her, and it becomes his fantasy that he will go to the bazaar and buy her something, but he is confronted
with reality when he arrives at the bazaar and sees that it is close.

The loss of innocence is the main theme of "Araby." By the end of the story, the narrator has matured into a wiser version of
himself and has come to terms with some difficult truths about himself. For one thing, he cannot be in love with someone he does not
know, realizing that he wants to buy the girl a gift not to please her but for selfish reasons; the boy wants her to pay attention to him, and
he believes that the gift will excite her interest. At the end of "Araby," the boy realizes that while he thought he was in love with his friend's
sister, he was just infatuated with her. He is physically attracted to her, but he does not know her well enough to buy her a gift at the
bazaar. Characterization is brilliant at no other point in the story as it is at the end. Joyce's protagonist is drawn with strokes that allow
us to recognize in "the creature driven and derided by vanity" both a boy who is initiated into knowledge through a loss of innocence and
a man who fully realizes the incompatibility between the beautiful and innocent world of the imagination and the very real world of fact.
Joyce uses character to embody the theme of his story in "Araby."

The story of the boy's vain quest focuses on his lonely romanticism and his ability to acquire the perspectives he now possesses.
The pursuit ends when he arrives at the market and realizes, gradually and painfully, that Araby is not what he expected or imagined. It
is gaudy and murky, and it thrives on the profit motive and the enduring allure that its name evokes in people. The boy realizes that he
has invested all of his hope and love in a world that exists only in his childish imagination. The final line is sobering: "Gazing up into the
darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." In his lofty imaginings,
the boy has imagined himself not as who he is, but as who he wishes to be - a figure out of a fairy tale, "chalice safely through a throng
of foes." He regards his infatuation-fueled quest as nothing more than childish vanity. He has attained self-reflection, as well as a sense
of scale that puts his actions into proper perspective. He is irritated and betrayed, and he realizes he has been lying to himself. He
considers himself to be a being driven and despised by his own vanity. Joyce allows readers to discover "the creature driven and derided
by vanity" at the end of the short story.

References

https://www.plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Araby.pdf

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1st Semester A.Y. 2022-2023
 College of Education, Arts, and Sciences
Katapatan Homes, Banay-Banay, City of Cabuyao

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1st Semester A.Y. 2022-2023