Analysis of Araby Short Story by James Joyce - Essay Example

The thesis statement is that: As we grow up and come face-to-face with practical life, we find out that life is not what we expected it to be, and this makes us angry and frustrated. We read about the boy’s fantasies about Mangan’s sister. We read about his ecstatic feelings and romantic joy when the girl asks him to attend the Araby bazaar on her part because she cannot go. We come to know about the boy’s fantasies of buying a beautiful gift for the girl of his dreams. His frustration got a start when his uncle came home late in the night.

Taking a little sum of money, he headed out to the bazaar; but when he reached there, he saw that, to his dismay, the bazaar was about to close, with only a few stalls open. The lights were going out slowly. This was the push-up for his frustration, which added up when he found out that he could not find a decent gift for the girl with the little sum of money that he had. He was angry. He said, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

” This shows how demeaning it was for him to see that he was late. He was late. We all get late and mourn over the things we cannot get in our lives. The story revolves around the theme that no one can enliven his dreams in the true sense. We dream of achieving things we desire; we work hard to get them; but sometimes, we fail. What we dream of all our lives gets shattered all of a sudden. The gift symbolizes the goals that we want to achieve, and the boy’s sadness symbolizes our frustration which shows when we see that our efforts are going in vain.

This is all part and parcel of life. This is the tragedy of life. What we get is not what we yearn for, and what we yearn for seems too far away from us. We feel ourselves in total darkness. In short, the story is about human frustration over the loss of something despite true efforts. This is the story of everybody because all of us go through such aggravation at some point in our lives. Good thing is to take a fresh start instead of mourning over what we have lost.