Infatuation In Araby By James Joyce

Araby is a short story written by James Joyce, in the story there a young boy that obsess with his friends sister, the girl which live next door to the boy. The young boy is unnamed however the entire story is from his perspective. The narrator infatuation is so intend that he can’t even speak with the girl that he like. One day she ask him if he is going to araby which is a town “bazaar”. The girl said that she won’t attend the festival in the town. Which triggers him to set his mind that he must go and bring her back something. The rest of his time he spend anxiously waiting until the evening so that he can go to araby. When he finally gets there, everything is close and shut down. He leave disappointed with nothing to give the girl. During the story Joyce formulates the reader for the boy’s discouragement at the end of the story.
The romantic language, details, and imagery of the passage create a joyful and physical tone. Drawing from the religious, chivalric, and emotional realms, Joyce balances words and details, the implications of
which carry the boy’s romantic, but naïve idea of love. The naïve narrator defines the object of his confused love (to whom he has not even spoken) in terms strongly suggesting religious worship. As a religious believer carries a saint’s medal or other religious relic as endless protection and reminder, on his journeys “in places most unfriendly to romance.” the boy brings with him “her image” a figure celestially, beautifully backlit “by the light from the half-opened door.” Like a guardian angel, “her name” (although it is never revealed in the story; he simply calls her “Mangan’s sister”) motivates in him “strange prayers and praises.” The “prayers and praises” grow out of his uncontrolled, childish love of this attractive older girl, who, for him, has become a holy presence worthy of this devotion and worship. Such religious connotations impart to his love flawlessness and desire far beyond the level of a mundane boyish obsession.
The religious and chivalric traditions congregate as, in his imagination, he “[bears his] chalice safely through a mass of rivals.” Thus he becomes the knight-errant bearing the Holy Grail through the dangers of the evil world; she then is the lady fair, worthy of his “adoration” because of her purity and goodness. The allusion brings with it all the relations of chivalric honor connected with tradition of courtly love. Romantic excess pervades his vision of his love. He finds his “eyes . . . full of tears” and experiences “a flood from his heart.” Although he cannot explain these sensations, he understands them as physical signs of his deep-felt love.
The accurate and natural expression, detail, and imagery, on the other hand, create a negative tone that contrasts harshly with the naïve, romantic tone. Drawing from the ordinary, commonplace, and worldly spheres of daily life, Joyce blends words and details, the connotations of which emphasize the world’s lacking and shameful reality.
Secular and naturalistic diction, detail, and imagery of the marketplace contrast the spiritual, romanticized language of the knight-errant’s quest. His “prayers and praises” compete with “the curses of labourers,” a negative, destructive prayer. Moreover, “the shrill litanies of the shop boys” and “the nasal chanting of the street-singers” pervert the religious connotations of the litany and chanting into ordinary and ugly elements of commerce. The shop boys “st[and] on guard,” not by their ladies fair, but “by barrels of pigs’ cheeks.” The street-singers are not troubadours, singing about knights’ heroic deeds, but “about the troubles in our native land,” evoking a sense of the lowness and violence of the real world. Such realism attests to the harsh truths of daily life which overwhelm idealism and romance.
Thus mundane and even sordid details of the life of the “flaring streets” directly oppose the chivalric and religious images.
The boy carries no chalice, but instead “some of the parcels” from his aunt’s weekly shopping trip. Even the allusion to the Holy Grail is double-edged since, in addition to its religious and chivalric associations, it also carries with it reminder that the grail disappeared because its protector lusted for a young woman, just as the narrator lusts for Mangan’s sister, Furthermore, the foes he is not challenged by dark knights and dragons, but instead is “jostled by drunken men and bargaining women.” Whether the “bargaining women” are merely the haggling shoppers or, on a more sordid level, prostitutes propositioning the “drunken men,” his vision of the chaste lady fair is countered by the commercial pursuits of the “bargaining women.” For this reason, the boy’s illusions of courtly love seem
unrealistic.
In the final sentence the romantic and realistic come together in the most subtle of contrasts. The narrator sums up his intense emotions: “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.” Although this simile has both the romantic connotations of beauty and gentleness and the spiritual associations of the angel’s harp, it also describes metaphorically what the boy feels physically. Despite his attempt to idealize his emotions, he feels the adolescent stirrings of sexual desire. His body is truly an instrument upon which the sexual stimulation of the girl plays.
By presenting the contrast between the romantic illusions of the boy and the realistic truths of the Streets, Joyce foreshadows the boy’s eventual disillusionment. This foreshadowing prepares the reader for the story’s epiphany. Although the boy learns the truth only after experiencing Araby’s tawdriness, Joyce builds toward this climactic revelation through his careful choices of words, details, and images.