Araby Short Story

Araby was published in James Joyce's short

story collection, Dubliners in 1914.

“Araby” is one of fifteen short stories that

together make up James Joyce’s collection,
Dubliners.

Dubliners paints a portrait of life in Dublin,

Ireland, at the turn of the twentieth century.
Its stories are arranged in an order
reflecting the development of a child into a
grown man.
Araby Short Story

“Araby” is the last story of the first set,

and is told from the perspective of a boy
just on the verge of adolescence.

The story takes its title from a real

festival which came to Dublin in 1894 when
Joyce was twelve years old.
 James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, aka James Joyce was
born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland and died on
January 13, 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is an Irish novelist
and ever discovered new literary methods in such large
works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Joyce, the eldest of 10 children in his family to survive

infancy, was sent at age six to Clongowes Wood College, a
Jesuit boarding school that has been described as “the
Eton of Ireland.” Joyce did not return to Clongowes in 1891;
instead he stayed at home for the next two years and tried
to educate himself.

April 1893, he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted,

without fees, to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar
school in Dublin.
 He entered University College, Dublin, which was
then staffed by Jesuit priests. There he studied
languages and reserved his energies for
extracurricular activities, reading widely—
particularly in books not recommended by the
Jesuits—and taking an active part in the college’s
Literary and Historical Society.

Joyce got a job in Berlitz School at Pola in Austria-

Hungary (now Pula, Croatia), working in his spare
time at his novel and short stories. In, 1905 they
moved to Trieste, where James’s brother Stanislaus
joined them and where their children, Giorgio and
Lucia, were born.

In 1906–07, for eight months, he worked at a bank in

Rome, from that, story "The dead" begun.
James Joyce’s Works
 Summary
Araby is a story about an Ireland’s
young boy who similar in age and
temperament to those in “The
sisters” and “An Encounter” develops
a crush in Megan’s sister, a girl lives
across the street.

One day she plans to ask him to go

to the bazaar called Araby. But, she
cannot attend because she will be on
a retreat, so the boy promises her to
bring something from the Araby.
 Summary
The boy receives permission to the
Araby on Saturday night.

When Saturday night comes, his

uncle returns home late, possibly
visited a pub after work. After a long
waiting, the boy received money for
the bazaar. But it is too late for him
to go to the Araby. The bazaar is
shutting down at that night.

The boy does not have enough

money to buy something for Megan’s
sister anyway. At last, he is left
disenchanted by what he finds and
 Characters
1. The Narrator
● Young boy harboring crush on
Mangan's sister
● Represents Ireland, and the
struggle to break free from the
church
● Lower middle class
● Drive to please others
● Naive, immature, hopeful,
persistent, shy, withdrawn
● Not particularly happy
 Characters
2. The Narrator's Aunt
● The narrator's mother figure
● calm, loving, thoughtful
● A Devout Catholic
● appears to be primarily concerned with
domestic tasks and shopping.

3. The Narrator's Uncle

● Alcoholic, irresponsible, forgetful
● Self-centered man who forgets
about the bazaar and almost
causes the narrator to miss the
event.
 Characters

4. Mangan
● Narrator's friend
● Playful
● Because of Mangan, the narrator is able to
see Mangan's sister and exchange words

5. Mangan's Sister
● Older (teenage) girl
● Responsible and mature
● Representation of the church
● The object of the narrator’s schoolboy
crush
● She is polite, and seems unaware of the
narrator’s feelings for her.
● She treats narrator courteously but not
 “Araby”: A Homeric Reading

Is a movement of three childhood stories, “The Sisters”, “An Encounter”, and “Araby” which
this three stories equated with Homer’s Telemachia in Odyssey’s first four books and part of
the fifteen book.

These three stories is a Telemachus type which mean a fatherless boy or orphan.

The homeric action adumbrated in general pattern, which one should observe in the first
story that the boy does little but brood over the lost father and listen others talk about him.

Same with Telemachus in the first book, he goes on two quests and make trips to Pylos and
to Sparta.
 “Araby”: A Homeric Reading
Many details are reproduced in this general framework, but analogizing process
operates here is more thematically up the second and third movements.

The boy is fictional device of represents an orphan, it is significance of Joyce’s

method. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is difficult not to identify the
nameless boy with the Stephen Daedalus of a portrait, and hence with Joyce
himself.

In suspect, these stories were originally part of vast body of Stephen Hero out of
which A Portrait derived, and Dubliners.

Last, the point is Joyce lived with his real parents in his childhood and so represent
himself in Daedalus. His device here is placing the boy in a home of guardians is
an artful means of approximating the situations of Telemachus.
 Joyce’s “Araby”: Paradise Lost

Christianity for Joyce is inescapable. Joyce always views the order and
disorder of the world, in terms of the Catholic faith in which he was reared.
The extremely popular "Araby" illustrates the manner in which Joyce
integrates the pattern of action with the intricate symbolism of his Catholic
background.

The priest had shirked the full responsibilities of his ministry and sought
escape from his pastoral trusts in chronicles of romance and adventure. The
priest has ceased to herd the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

For against the background of of the annual re-living of the life of Jesus
Christ, Joyce projects the next development of his story. Then, he attempts to
substitute the ephemeral titillations of romantic passion for the ineffable
ecstasy of mystical participation in the Holy Passion. Joyce resorts to
inversions of the guiding light to dramatize the boy's susceptibility to the
 Joyce’s “Araby”: Paradise Lost

Joyce clearly associates the girl with the derelict morality of Ireland. The
combination of lust and romantic illusion generated by these glimpses of
Mangan's sister has an interesting parallel in "The Dead". And it is the vision that
fires the sexual passion leading to an epiphany even more agonizing and
disillusioning than the boy's.

According to traditional Christian myth, only the one who from apl eternity
has existed ever commanded such love and veneration, the One whose secret
and unutterabor name was YHVH ( Yahveh ). So holy was this tetragrammaton
that it was safrilege for a layman to pronounce it.

The rites of the Incarnation which occur on Christmas, is also known as the
appearance of light in the depth of darkness. But he doesn't remember that only
true light can solve all the problem. Joyce connects the 'confused adoration' with
the perversion of the hymns. Because of that, it was turns into an analogue of
sensuality, an explicit rejection of spiritual love.
 Joyce’s “Araby”: Paradise Lost
Joyce improvises the symbolism of the East so persistent in the writings of the
Church Fathers, as influenced by the identification with Christ in Zacharias VI, 12 ("The
Orient is His name.") abd by the antiphon of the liturgy O Oriens ("The great day of the
everlasting life will no longer be illuminated by the visible sun, but by the true light, the
sun of justice, which is called the Orient..) then substitutes the Araby and its brown
madonna for heaven and the divine mary.

Joyce reveals his hero's infatuation with _nunc fluens_, the present which is always
flying away, and _nunc stans_, the eternal present (the boon of Heaven). First
impression starts by satanic corruption. Such as gaming "stalls" and musical
entertainment at the "Cafe Chantant," and the Irish who are cooperating with the devil
in promoting the moral degradation of native population. Joyce enlarge the dimensions
of this gimcrack Eden.

Joyce shows the symbolism, the annunciation. The vase and the imitation flowers
reflect the pervasive secularization of the culture. In the end, there are no hope, faith,
or charity (love) for him, because he goes away from his vision of the eternal light of
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

A. Joyce’s Task of Writing in Dublin and the Context of Publication of His Dubliners

● The principal reasons for local conflicts within Northern Ireland are both political and religious.
● Some of the major historical and political events occurring in Ireland immediately before and after the writing
and publication of the short story were;
○ The beginning of Irish revolution against the British rule in 1912
○ The Irish Home Rule Bill which granted an independent parliament to Ireland which was passed, although its
enactment was delayed until 1920
○ The Easter Rebellion which broke out in Dublin in which Irish nationalist forces took control of the city before they
were forced to surrender by British troops (April 24 – April 29)
○ The Irish War of Independence between Irish nationalists and British forces during 1919 – 1921
○ The government of Ireland established six of the nine counties of Ulster as the province of Northern Ireland and granted
independent parliaments to both Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1920
○ In 1921 Anglo – Irish Treaty was signed which ended the Irish War of Independence and granted limited freedom to Ireland in
December 6
○ In 1922 the Irish Free State is established
○ Irish Revolution
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

● James Joyce was writing Dubliners within this highly tumultuous context of conflict.
● The oppressive religious, economic, cultural and political forces on the lives of the middle class and lower class
Irish people in particular those inhabitants of Dublin provided the material for Joyce to realistically reflect
Dubliners as paralyzed people.

B. Discussion
1. Postcolonial Notion of Mimicry
● The colonizer employs mimicry as a strategy for maintaining the dominance over the colonized as “the Other”
or the stereotype in order to justify its identity and authority.
● The colonized uses mimicry in order to destabilize this identity and power
● As a result, the Other (colonized) by means of mimicry impairs the strategy of the self (colonizer) which has the
“assumed priority” over it.
● The colonized has the capacity to make up a new identity for itself.
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce
● In Araby, the bazaar is described as a splendid place for the narrator to visit it. Despite the narrator’s
enthusiasm, his uncle wants him to not go there.
● Imagining him as a knight who wants to carry the Holy Grail and buy a gift to his fait lady, the narrator
actually imitates the way colonizers want to explore the East (the Bazaar).
● When he passes by train and passes through the river he reaches the bazaar and is disappointed by the
atmosphere and the epiphany happens there.
● He then receives a new identity which is quite different from the sort of identity he had in the beginning of
the story: “Gazing up into darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and decided by vanity; and my eyes
burned with anguish and anger”.
● This new identity is the narrator’s forced compatibility to Dublin’s dull surroundings.
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

2. Postcolonial Notion of Hybridity

● Hybridization is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single
utterance, an encounter within the arena of an utterance, between two
different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an
epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.
● To investigate the relationship between colonizer and the colonized and
shows that these two have double identities.
● The colonizer does not have absolute authority and identity and although
tries to reject the culture of the colonized, it is under its influence.
● Throughout the story we realize that the boy cannot understand Mangan’s
sister fully with whom he had little communication.
● When he has the opportunity to communicate with her, he invites her to the
bazaar however she rejects since she had to go to the “Retreat”. (Retreat was
popularized in Roman Catholicism by the Jesuits is a period of seclusion for
meditating, getting advice, praying and discovering ways of improving moral
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

● This show how the Irish life is so much intertwined with its dominant religion which was Roman
Catholicism.
● The narrator refers prayers and praises as “strange” and he mentions that I cry and “I don’t
understand why”
● The narrator is a symbol of the Irish people that underwent an identity crisis because of the
hybridity that was prevalent throughout their culture as a result of the British political domination
over Ireland.
● The bazaar and the presence of the woman and several other men as well as their arguments
indicate the direct struggle of the colonizer and the colonized
● The bazaar stands for the colonized and the woman and the men stand for the colonizers who seem
to have conflict with each other.
● As a result of lack of self-recognition and as a result of rejecting the identity of the Other, the
colonized experiences a crisis that is shown in the tone and content of their dialogue.
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

3. Language in Post-colonialism
● In Araby, the narrator hears the English quarrel among the women and the men which results in the final
sentence which is at the same time the climax of the story and is where the epiphany occurs.
● Joyce indirectly criticizes the way (imposition of English language) the colonizer has made the
“splendid” bazaar (Ireland) such a dull and depressing land.
● References in the story that indicates Joyce’s celebration of Dublin’s native culture and language;
Ballads of come-all-ye’s is about the Irish history and politics: “…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…”

4. Superior/Inferior in Post-colonialism
● The single most evident sentence from the story which proves the existence of the notion of
superiority/inferiority and the claim for reading the story from a post-colonial perspective is: “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”

·
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

● “Harp”, as the musical instrument to which the narrator has been compared, can be regarded as Ireland
in general.
● Mangan’s sister has domination over boy or the boy has no control over her.
● Mangan’s sister participates in the Retreat and therefore she can be regarded as the symbol of Roman
Catholicism and as the one who controls Ireland: the colonizer.
● The narrator is reduced to a musical instrument is the colonized Ireland under the domination of the
colonizer à A colonized nation (harp) whose wires are played by the colonizer
● The narrator feels inferior and disillusioned in the bazaar when faced with the English young woman
with whom he had conversation and then he “turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the
bazaar…”.
 A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story
“Araby” (1914) by James Joyce

Conclusion

● Joyce wanted to show the colonized notion of Ireland by the British Empire
● Joyce through a realistic and lucid style of writing shows how the domination of the British
ruling has been so intertwined within the Irish culture.
● Joyce shoes that although his language has been influenced by the colonization power of
British Empire, still he is able to portray his critique of the ruling power and to portray the
living status of Irish people through his language.
● Araby with its rich imagery and symbolism provided a strong reason to be read post-
colonially.

Reference:
Maniee, P. (2017). A Post-colonial Study of the Short Story "Araby" (1914) by James Joyce.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences.