Araby, By James Joyce

James Joyce's short story Araby runs about a boy, falling in love for the first time in his life. The narrator is attempting to win the girl's affection by presenting her something from the Araby bazaar. The boy, a narrator of a story, is not a static character. His image, thus, continually evolves, as well as the concepts around him. One should point out that Araby bazaar, at first, serves as an image of shelter from the impeding environment of the boy's neighborhood in Dublin, but then changes dramatically. James Joyce conveys the theme that in man's youthful idealism and his naive vanity, he finds nothing but disappointment, which is caused by the limitations of the outer world.
The story is told in the first person narration, which is very important when characterizing the main character, as the reader perceives all the events around and trough him. The opening paragraph of the story introduces the context and establishes the environment as rather tedious and gloomy one. Joseph Kelly states that in the story Joyce
The saleslady's asks whether he would like to buy something only because she has to as a vendor. Warren Beck also states that to wake up from that lack of interest means for the boy to face a fragmented life, in which pure and ideal love is mangled by the useless and dubious chatting of the saleslady's talk with two men, idly continued after her careless note to the narrator (103). Subsequently, the narrator starts to comprehend the saleslady's both superficial attitude and talk, which shows much more common, casual, and admissible form of life. Such form of life opposes his absolute and optimistic vision of love. The boy even engages himself in this false and insignificant conduct, "I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem more real. Then, I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar" (Joyce