Araby, By James Joyce

James Joyce throughout “Araby”, uses the narrator to show realism and depict a slow transition from immature tendencies to maturity. In this first person story, the narrator infatuated with a girl known as Mangan’s sister, uses immature tactics in a hopeless plot to win over the girl he has “never spoken to” (68). During the James Joyce short story, we see the narrator express immature undeveloped infatuation for a girl he barely knows leading some to think he is a young adolescent. Additionally, Mangan’s sister serves as a crucial reason behind the narrator’s actions and eventual transition throughout the story. The boy’s long, inconvenient trip to the Bazaar for Mangan’s sister seems to agitate and cause the boy to question such infatuation and purpose. Upon his arrival, the boy realized that the trip to the bazaar was unnecessary and useless. This, causes the boy to feel “anguish and anger” (72), and
Clearly infatuated, the narrator is consumed with thoughts of Mangan’s sister as he lays “on the floor in the front parlour watching her door” (68). Additionally the narrator is very emotional and confused about his obsession with Mangan’s sister despite her lack of involvement in his life saying, “I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her my confused adoration” (69). Such thinking only leads one to assume the narrator must be, young, immature, and undeveloped. A Miami University Research Group Experiment team identifies the narrator as an adolescent concluding he “signifies such characteristics as childlike playfulness and the inability to postpone pleasure – generally, behavior that most children of a comparable age would exhibit” (Barney, 243). Being so young, the narrator’s actions throughout the poem become understandable and easily relatable for many people of a similar