Abstract
The present study has been covered an overview and the analysis of the short story “Araby” to find out what makes the protagonist a lonely person, by plot points, characters and themes, and then it has been included a discussion about the gain of the protagonist from the journey. The story starts in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street. The narrator, a boy who is unnamed, believed to be at the age of around twelve (Cummings), describes the street where he lives at the very beginning of the story. He then thinks about the priest who died in the house before his family moved in, and the games that he and his friends played in the street, recalling how they were running through the back lanes of the houses and hid in the shadows to avoid people in their neighborhood, especially the boy’s uncle, and the sister of his friend Mangan. Mangan’s sister is always in the thoughts of the narrator although they talk little. The paper enables us to have an opportunity to reflect on our life: if we reflect the “gain” again in the more critical direction, we should not regard the loss of innocence as any gain: the innocence that we cannot easily retrieve it from society must be protected before it is lost; to a large extent, innocence may not be negative if we consider it as a source of happiness.
Highlights
The story starts in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street
The narrator, a boy who is unnamed, believed to be at the age of around twelve (Cummings), describes the street where he lives at the very beginning of the story. He thinks about the priest who died in the house before his family moved in, and the games that he and his friends played in the street, recalling how they were running through the back lanes of the houses and hid in the shadows to avoid people in their neighborhood, especially the boy’s uncle, and the sister of his friend Mangan
James Joyce plays up the protagonist’s thirst for “Araby”, and for climax, it is narrated that he arrives in the bazaar eventually, but the bazaar is not the place that he wanted in his mind, as follows: most the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness
Summary
The narrator, a boy who is unnamed, believed to be at the age of around twelve (Cummings), describes the street where he lives at the very beginning of the story. He thinks about the priest who died in the house before his family moved in, and the games that he and his friends played in the street, recalling how they were running through the back lanes of the houses and hid in the shadows to avoid people in their neighborhood, especially the boy’s uncle, and the sister of his friend Mangan. The name, Araby, itself has already implied the Arabic exoticism and the unlimited and unique charm of the Middle East, “the mystique and allure of the Middle East” (Cummings), at the same time symbolizing the target of life of the protagonist, and the discovery of the ideality, that inevitably involve the process which leads to the loneliness to himself; but at least he will gain something about the reality until the age that he understands the inevitable conflict between the ideality and reality, and will think more maturely beyond the innocence in the past
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