James Joyce Araby Research Paper

James Joyce: A Life for the Storybooks February 2, 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born into a middle-class family in Dublin, Ireland. Joyce was just another little boy, but he grew into an author, one of the best authors, he changed how people told stories and how they thought about the world. One of the most interesting factors of Joyce is the connection between his life and works, one story that illustrates this quite well is his short story Araby. Most authors write about their life and bring different themes from their own world, such as faith, family, and hardships, to life in their work. Joyce, however, still felt a divide between real life and what he read, "one of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth
Something he did often was to base the main female or love interest on Nora Barnacle, his romantic partner and later wife. In Araby, although the boy is focused on his first love she plays a small part in his story, so it is more than likely that she is based on Barnacle but there is little to information to prove this to be true. Joyce paint a story that at first glance is only about a boy experiencing first love or more accurately, first obsession. The unnamed boy has spoken to the object of his affection maybe twice in his life, this story is not about her, it is about him. Araby is about a young boy growing up in Ireland trying to understand the world and why things happen. How his life is affected by those around him and that even with the best intentions life does not always work out for the best. This boy learns this through small mistake and little failures, something everyone one day learns, something Joyce had to learn at a young age. The oldest of ten with a harsh father and soft mother he had to find his own way and this story is the epitome of grow up in a moment. Once again putting his world into his reader’s hands, for them to
Joyce did not need a murder or a twist to have the reader on the edge of their seat, he brings them in slow and quietly and until he has them completely invested in the story of a boy who never truly existed. Except that the boy’s story is true and still happens, just not in the same way, because everyone has experienced or will experienced first love and first heartbreak. Joyce is able to make the feelings so real because they are real, he takes the feeling from his first heartbreak, he first painful realization and puts them into words that build the bazaar around the reader, Joyce made fiction feel true by using true feeling and real