Preview

Araby: The Arab's Farewell to His Steed

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
3695 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Araby: The Arab's Farewell to His Steed
“Araby”I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
SummaryThe narrator, an unnamed boy, describes the North Dublin street on which his house is located. 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. He recalls how they would run through the back lanes of the houses and hide in the shadows when they reached the street again, hoping to avoid people in the neighborhood, particularly the boy’s uncle or the sister of his friend Mangan. The sister often comes to the front of their house to call the brother, a moment that the narrator savors.
Every day begins for this narrator with such glimpses of Mangan’s sister. He places himself in the front room of his house so he can see her leave her house, and then he rushes out to walk behind her quietly until finally passing her. The narrator and Mangan’s sister talk little, but she is always in his thoughts. He thinks about her when he accompanies his aunt to do food shopping on Saturday evening in the busy marketplace and when he sits in the back room of his house alone. The narrator’s infatuation is so intense that he fears he will never gather the courage to speak with the girl and express his feelings.
One morning, Mangan’s sister asks the narrator if he plans to go to Araby, a Dublin bazaar. She notes that she cannot attend, as she has already committed to attend a retreat with her school. Having recovered from the shock of the conversation, the narrator offers to bring her something from the bazaar. This brief meeting launches the narrator into a period of eager, restless waiting and fidgety tension in anticipation of the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Araby 's protagonist feels insignificant, as he is ignored in his requests to his uncle and treated as unimportant from his aunt. A hopeless desire arises in him as he glorifies his friend 's sister and it becomes his sole focus in life. His education suffers with a disinterest in class as he “...chafed against school”, and his Master hoped “...he was not beginning to idle”, as his attention span drifted from the pages he “...strove to read”.…

    • 1249 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    ‘The Sisters’ and ‘An Encounter’ are about the same length. ‘Araby’ is roughly a hundred lines shorter than these. There is a progression in the three stories. The boy in ‘The Sisters’ is a passive witness, limited in his capacity to act by the weight of the adults about him. The boy of ‘An Encounter’ rebels against this oppression but his reward is the menace of a bizarre and abnormal adult. The boy in ‘Araby’ strives both to act and to realize an actual affective relationship but suffers frustration, a thwarting that results both from the burden of adult control and his own recognition of the falseness of his aims.…

    • 1533 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Araby Hero

    • 622 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The destination that the boy is given in “Araby” is the bazaar that will be coming to town, named Araby. When Mangan’s sister, a young lady he has a romantic interest in, informs him of the event, he decides…

    • 622 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Textual analysis of The Sisters reveals numerous literary devices that explicate the theme of the repression of possibility by the city of its people. Throughout, Joyce uses symbolism, metaphors, and ellipsis to emphasise his themes whilst allowing the reader to infer its meanings without the need to describe them explicitly. The italicised words ’paralysis’, ‘gnomon’ and ‘simony’ (page 1) is one such technique and immediately underscores the physical, spiritual and religious restrictions found within the story that Dubliners symbolises as a ‘paralysis’ (p1) of the city and its people.…

    • 2342 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    His reaction is quite awkward, and that is comprehensive taking into account the description we already made about the narrator. What comes next is another aspect it is good to analyze. Since the Mangan´s sister mentions the Araby and what she likes it too much, he offers to bring her something (a gift) due to she is not able to go. Here the aspect to analyze is what a human being is able to do in order to get a minimum chance of getting a girl. In the case of the narrator, he has a big pressure because he believes that bringing her that gift makes him create a connection with her. This paragraph represent how important this conversation is for him, “What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read”. Psychological speaking, the Araby and the gift represent that motivation he is looking for, and he knows that if he fails in that “mission”, his minimum hopes with his love will suddenly…

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Araby - Short Essay

    • 337 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Campbell’s three stages -departure, initiation, return- are further broken up into seventeen different stages, though most stories do not cover all seventeen. One of the primary stages of departure is described by Campbell as “The Call to Adventure”, which he defines as "A blunder…reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood.” (____). Joyce clearly uses this in Araby when he introduces the characters playing in the lower-class streets of Dublin. The narrator is drawn “into a relationship” with Mangan’s sister. His adventure happens to be his trip to Araby to fetch her a present. This is not unlike the story of Helen of Troy, where the warriors are drawn into battle over the obsession with Helen. The narrator is no stranger to obstacles along his way, which is another defining trait of departure. His alcoholic uncle is late yet again and he cannot find an entrance to the bazaar. It is amazing, how in such a short…

    • 337 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Araby Questions

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages

    3. The narrator doesn’t buy anything for Mangan’s sister because when he gets to one of the open booths, he does not feel wanted by the lady who is selling the items. This turns him off of buying anything.…

    • 769 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Setting the scene for the reader, the vocabulary within “Araby” invokes an immediate feeling of loneliness. Throughout the short story, Joyce’s word choice enlightens the reader as to the emotions and state of maturity within the boy. The young boy uses diction such as “detached” “uninhabited” and “blind” to describe North Richmond Street, despite the obvious happiness of other children on the street. Although he interacts with other children his age, the boy has a longing and curiosity to explore the actions and emotions…

    • 1252 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    compare and contrast

    • 725 Words
    • 2 Pages

    When young people are set into a dull and constant living environment ,they will have a sense of being trapped and even they will grasp an idea to escape from their original life.The protagonist in A&P Sammy is a cashier and lives in a small town “ five miles from beach”.He is young and fed up with the life currency “the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something else before they get out…..with six children…”.The common figures of women seem have rooted in his heart and which will never lit his flames of passion.He is cynical as he considers everyone around him as sheep and “there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years”. Analogously, in Araby the young boy lives in an area where “ being blind….an uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end……imperturbable faces”. It fully pictured the dullness and the gloominess of that city in Ireland. Both stories show the protagonists are not satisfied with their current life ,only boredom occupies their life whole.…

    • 725 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Themes Of Our Araby

    • 1453 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The car plunged from sun drenched desert into tall, dark palms. Into a different world. Inside, the road softened to a track that wound and bumped its way forward over sandy, unimproved soil, shielded from the sun’s glare by walls of greenery. That is, the track came about as close as any vehicleway can to being in harmony with earth and vegetation. But before long it ended; just petered out. A few yards ahead, nestling so naturally among the palms that at first my eye hardly registered it, stood a thatched-roof cabin. Or perhaps the right word is “shanty.” For the place had a definite South Sea Island air. The big stars-and-stripes hanging from a flagpole seemed almost colonial.…

    • 1453 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Compare and Contrast Essay

    • 1855 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Cited: Barnhisel, Greg. "An overview of 'Araby, '." Short Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.…

    • 1855 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Isolation In Araby

    • 1203 Words
    • 5 Pages

    It has a physical significance, as well as an emotional significance. It seems to find a part in the life of everyone in the community. There are many situations in the story where the boy feels separated and detached from Mangan's sister, his love. His feelings for her are so strong that he feels he needs to isolate himself in order to keep her out of reach. Even though they barley communicate, the mere image of her brings him much happiness. As the boy illustrates "I have never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like summons to all my foolish blood. ( )" Whenever he is gazing at her and watching her figure, he tends to always be hidden, whether it's behind a railing, or on the other side of a window. "Every morning I lay on the floor in front of the parlor watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen" ( ). Even the boy's house is isolated from the whole neighborhood because it's located at the end of the street. The bicycle is rusty and does not work, therefore, there is no transportation; in a sense they are trapped. When the boy was traveling to the carnival he was all alone in the carriage. Finally when he got to Araby it was unfortunately closing down and he was alone again. Being alone in the carriage and at the carnival diminishes him as a person, and lowers him to a level, which makes him feel like he…

    • 1203 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Araby" chronicles a young boy's disclosure from the moment he experiences an intense emotional and physical attraction toward a girl, for the very first time. The boy, whom remains nameless throughout the story, feels passionately drawn to his friend Mangan's sister. One day, she asks him if he is going to Araby, a local bazaar. Unable to attend, Mangan's sister urges the boy to go. Hypnotized by her presence, the boy promises that if he goes he will bring something back for her. After a sleepless night, the boy dwells on his feelings for Mangan's sister and the possibilities of giving her something from the Araby bazaar. He asks permission from his uncle to go, and he receives it; but his uncle seems distracted and comes home extremely…

    • 1443 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In James Joyce’s short story Araby he is successful in creating an intense narrative. He does this in such a way that he enables the reader to feel what it is actually like to live in Dublin at the turn of the century when the Catholic Church had an enormous amount of authority over Dubliner’s. The reader is able to feel the narrators exhausting struggle to escape this influence of the Catholic Church by replacing it with a materialistic driven love for a girl.…

    • 1012 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    James Joyce - An encounter

    • 1277 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The main themes are: religion, the escape, freedom, journey, routine, isolation, paralysis and monotony. As a cultural background, people were looking for freedom, for new adventures tired of the routine of life. This aspect can be easily observed by the readers, in the story. The everyday life of Dubliners didn’t bring joy and excitement in their lives. One of the narrator’s confessions is: ,, But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me’’.…

    • 1277 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays

Related Topics