Character Analysis - Assignment Example

The first words spoken by the girl of his dream was also about ‘Araby’, giving the reader the assumption that it will be a mythological place that he can escape from reality and his harsh environment. The story of ‘Araby’ highlights the contradiction between reality and illusion through illustration of the transformation of innocence to the path of realization and disillusionment as a phenomenon that occurs in a child’s boyhood. The protagonist of the story is the matured boy who had once been the innocent boy depicted in the story.

The story opens with the lines “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free”. Paradoxically, even though they were free from school, even their play did not give them the desired pleasure, for it was an equally dull world, where not even play brought any stimulant for the children. All these descriptions of dullness actually create the backdrop against which the boy takes resort to an imagination larger than life and hence encounters a surprising disillusionment.

In “Araby”, the author focuses on character rather than on plot to expose the ironical evidences present in self-deception. On one hand, "Araby" is a story of a boy’s search for excellence or his dream. The search is in vain but gives way to an inner self-realization and an initial step into manhood. From another facet, the story encompasses a grown up man's experience. While the boy's first hand experience relates to his meet with the first love it is also a portrayal of an unrelenting problem of human life – the incongruity between what one wishes to be or have and what destiny actually has in store for us.

This opposition experienced by the boy sets up the theatrical background of a story of first love as narrated by the author who has used some consequential symbolic metaphors and irony to reveal the meaning of the story. Symbolic images portray the boy as a lonely individual who is aware of the bleakness of the surroundings – the dullness that he rejects silently to find solace in his world of fantasy. During the first reading, the story might seem to be about the love story or first crush of a young boy who craves to gain the attention of the girl, ‘Mangan’s sister’ whom he adores in his mind - “Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side” (Joyce, 539).

The boy simply cannot get her out of her mind – “At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read.” After the time when the girl speaks to him asking him to visit ‘Araby’, it is as if “The syllables of the word ‘Araby’ were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me” (Joyce, 540). The boy has now grown up into a man who is already aware of the reality and talks about his childhood innocence that led him to find a strange solace in fantasizing to describe which he says, “soul luxuriated”.

The idea of casting an enchantment somewhat prepares the contrast image that is eventually revealed in the end to make the boy realize the truth about the world where he lived. The presence of the girl’