James Joyce's Araby from Dubliners - Book Report/Review Example

James Joyces “Araby” from Dubliners Joyces “Araby”, a short story in Joyces first published collection of short fiction, Dubliners, might appear (at least at first glance) to be only a slight work. It is about a young boy (“Araby”, along with “The Sisters” and “An Encounter” is part of the group of stories in Dubliners in which Joyce deals with childhood experiences) who is in love with a girl, promises to buy her a present from the bizarre at Araby then, on arriving at the place late in the evening, decides not to buy anything at all. The action, and the manner in which that action is presented, is spare and undramatic, the tone is particularly realistic portraying an extremely realistic world. Nothing of much substance seems to happen. And yet it is precisely this absence which makes “Araby” such an intriguing piece of fiction. Because the presentation of the events has hardly any interpretation built into it, the reader starts to take up ideas and themes and works with them his or herself. The reader begins to formulate theories for answers that the text does not provide. This process brings a richness and depth to the short story that surely achieves what Joyce himself hoped for in his presentation of the real world, “out of the dreary sameness of existence, a measure of dramatic life may be drawn” (Joyce, 1959). The plot of “Araby” can be approached in two distinct ways. The first is to see Joyces narrative as merely a reporting of events. The style of the narration is precise and is, on the whole, devoid of any extraneous detail or description, shown by the predominance of simple sentences in which the subject, I, and the verb begin a succession of clauses: “I sat staring at the clock... I left the room. I mounted the staircase... I saw my companions playing...” Equally, the events described are simply laid out, there is no complex of characters or plot-lines, the events are linear and narrated in a linear fashion. The story does not have much more to it than the short description I gave at the beginning of the essay, the boy is in love with a girl, he offers to buy her a present, he goes to Araby, he doesnt buy it her – all the intervening periods are taken up merely with a period of waiting for the next event to occur. In fact, Arabys narrative could be considered so spare and simplistic that the piece very rarely makes any comments on the motives for the childs actions. Usually in the case of first person narratives one expects not only a commentary of the events that occur in the outside world but also an account of the interior processes that those events set in motion in the central character. “Araby” has very little of this second kind of narration, “I saw my companions playing below in the street [no and I thought...]. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct [no this made me feel...] and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived [no because...].” Although this absence of narratorial comment could be seen to simplify the plot (there is no extraneous detail added to the account of the events) it actually means that the story of “Araby” is much more complex than it initially appears. Once character motivation and narratorial commentary on events is omitted from a piece of fiction then it immediately invites the reader to wonder what it was that has been omitted. This is particularly marked in “Araby” because of the extremely elusive way that Joyce sometimes presents events. For example there are two occasions that the young boy at the centre of a story goes somewhere (once into “the drawing-room in which the priest had died and once into the attic) and absolutely nothing happens. Of course in life this might occur all the time, but in fiction we are used to the use of ellipsis to skim over events that are no consequence to the story (and Joyce certainly knows how to use the ellipsis to great effect, he skips over the days between the boy offering to buy the girl the present and him actually going to Araby in barely a paragraph - “I wised to annihilate the tedious intervening days.”). The conclusion we are led to is that these occasions are significant to the story, but rather than being important to the plot they are important to the internal world of the boy – surely there must be something important going through the boys head to make him murmur, “O love! O love” many times. Yet Joyce does not let us have access to the boys thoughts, so we are forced to speculate on what precisely it is he is thinking. Of course, the best example of this technique is at the very end of the story, in which the reader is not privy to whatever it is that makes the boy change his mind over buying the gift. This moment, were it written by another writer, would be the crux of the story, and we would see precisely why the boy has changed his mind about the present. Here, we dont, Joyce purposefully excludes us from the moment. Obviously this technique also has an effect of the characterisation of the main character, just as we must guess about his motivation we must also, in the main, guess about who he is as a person. We are given some emotional detail,for example on seeing Mangans sister he says “my heart leaped.” However, such statements of emotion are rare. Rather, we get the impression of the boy that he wants to escape the notion of himself as a self; he says when in the room where the priest died, “my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves”. The same desire can be seen in the way he is often shown in circumstances in which he is hiding, or viewing the world whilst not being viewed himself. He stays inside with “the blind down to within an inch of the sash” watching the girl he loves from the darkness, and looks down from the attic at “my companions playing below in the street”. Although he used to be one playing amongst them, during the course of the story he seems to grow away from his childish self, and in maturing, becomes dislocated from the world - whilst waiting to go to Araby he does not engage with “the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me childs play, ugly monotonous childs play.” The boy can be characterised as someone dislocated from the real world around him (preferring an idealized fantasy), and someone who does not look into himself. Indeed, what makes the final sentence of the story so shocking, and also so disillusioning for the young boy, is that it seems as though it is the first time that he has allowed himself a degree of introspection: “Gazing into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” He suddenly connects with the world and looks at himself and recognises a vanity. What further complicates the characterisation of the young boy at the centre of Joyces story is the point of view from which his story is told. One of the main reasons why the narrative avoids telling us much about the interior world of the boy is the distance at which the narrator stands from the person he is narrating. This might seem a strange thing to say, for ostensibly the narrator and the person he is narrating (the boy) are one and the same. However, there is a certain lack of presence in the narration, which is partly created by the use of the past tense. Also, the style of writing and the vocabulary used are very mature, and it is probably fair to assume that Joyce was not trying to write within the character of the boy as he was at the time of the events. Everything about the narration seems to point to the fact that the boy at the time of writing is quite considerably older than the younger self he is narrating, and as such is looking back at the events over the years. As such, the narrator would not have access to the boys immediate thoughts and impressions, he is seeing him almost as if he is someone else. This impression is only increased by an ironic tone that peaks through the text and gives an idea of the feelings of the older narrator toward his younger self. Hearing Mangans sisters name is “like a summons to all my foolish blood” (my emphasis). The foolish seems to be an imposition of the narrator onto his earlier self, seeing what he could not see then, that his desire for the girl would turn out to be foolish. Referring to the morning of the day he was to go to Araby he says “already my heart misgave me.” This seems to be a pre-sentiment of the disillusionment that is going to occur at the fair, it seems to say: already (before I had even felt the disappoint) I knew, somehow, that it was going to occur. Before finishing the discussion of the way Joyce uses characterisation in Araby, I would like to make special note of the way that Joyce shows the minor players in his drama, and with what precision and economy he paints vivid characters that seem as real as life. How “my uncle” acts when hes drunk is beautifully reconstructed by his wonderfully comic line (which has only passing relevance to the conversation he and the boy are having) - “he asked me did I know The Arabs Farewell to his Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about the recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt. Equally, even in just a few lines, the reader can instantly recognise the type of character Mrs. Mercer is “who collected used stamps for some pious purpose.” She is a busy-body (who partakes in “gossip of the tea-table”) and is wedded to her class. Even though she is discussed for barely three sentences she has been so economically drawn, that we can hear her voice perfectly well when she says “she was sorry she couldnt wait any longer, but it was after eight oclock and she did not like to be out late as the night air was bad for her.” It is also worth noticing that Joyce uses indirect speech, here, rather than directly quoting her. He does something similar when he paints the image of the boys school master, “I watched my masters face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle.” Here the narrator goes one step further and even assumes access to the masters thoughts. This use of indirect statement (whether of what someone has said or what they were thinking) is perhaps indicative, again, of the central characters personality. Despite avoiding himself, and what he himself is thinking, he filters everything he sees through himself. We do not see anything in the story apart from through the reflective glass of the boy (or his older self who is narrating the story). The setting, like the plot, seems at first to be simply realistic – it is a poor area of Dublin in the midst of a cold spell. However, like the other characters in the story, the setting itself is channelled through the personality of the central character and, in the process, comes alive within the storys prose. There is something drab, colourless about the setting, (Joyce wrote that he wished Dubliners to capture an account of the “paralysis which many consider a city” (Joyce 1966, 55)). The feeling is expressed by the personification of the houses which, “conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces,” and the lamps that wearily “lifted their feeble lanterns” to the sky. This personification gives the opening part of the story an almost dream-like quality, that further emphasises the idea that the world is being constructed through the eyes of our narrator. The fact that the setting is Ireland, particularly Dublin, is important to the story at the moments it breaks out. For this feeling of drabness, and of the dirtiness of life is locked in by Joyce to the particular Irishness of the setting. The boy and his mother walk through the streets “jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a comic-all-you about ODonovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land.” The negative feelings that all the commotion and actuality of this “single sensation of life” bring to the boy are (particular through the nationalistic songs of the street-singers) tied inextricably to a notion of Ireland and Irishness. In contrast, he hopes for the alien excitement of the “bazaar”, the promise of which “cast an Eastern enchantment over me.” The boy believes he that he is separate from the real world of the market (is more akin to the alien world of the bazaar, perhaps) and he “imagined that I bore my chalice safely through the throng of foes.” However, it is noticeable that the only way he can express his distance from Ireland and his dislike of the world it represents is to use the Catholic symbolism that is so much a part of Irish history: he carries the chalice, as a priest might to the mass. It seems that WB Stein is quite right to say, "no matter the work, Joyce always views the order and disorder of the world in terms of the Catholic faith in which he was reared." (Stein, 215). I think that the consistent reappearance of Catholic imagery in the piece is very important to a reading of “Araby”. I have said before that the apparent simpleness of the plot leaves room for a readers interpretation, and I think that this interpretation is spurred on by the subtle but pervasive religious imagery. Not only does the boy imagine himself carrying a chalice through the throng, but the silence at the bazaar is “that which pervades a church after a service.” Even the way that the girl is presented is reminiscent of Irish Catholicisms iconography, she appears, “her figure defined by the light from the half-open door,” and later “the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck”. She is being presented like the virgin Mary might be in the Catholic churches that Joyce was taken to in his youth. This undertone of religiosity adds another dimension, too, to the final feeling of disillusionment at Araby. At the end of the story, after much waiting, the boy gets on a train and makes his way to Araby. He is late, and the bazaar is closing down. It is easy to see that Araby is not precisely what the boy was expecting. He comes in after most of the stores are closed. He sees two men “counting money on a salver,” then wanders to another stall where a young lady is flirting with two gentleman. Unlike much of the dialogue in the story up to now, the conversation between the men is quoted directly (rather than coming to the reader indirectly filtered through the narrators consciousness). This gives added importance to the exchange, and only goes to emphasise how mundane it is; it is precisely the conversation one might have heard on the streets of Dublin that the young boy so disdained. Suddenly, it isnt stated why, the boy decides not to buy the present - “I knew my stay was useless” is the only thing the narrator tells us. This openness in respect to the boys motivation, allows space for interpretation on the readers part. The first, obvious, disappointment is that of Araby itself. Far from being a place of “Eastern enchantment” is precisely the same kind of sordid environment that the boy sought to escape. Secondly, though she is not mentioned in the final paragraphs, there is a distinct feeling that the boys love for the girl, like his belief in Araby as some paradise of Eastern promise, has also vanished – he does not feel the need to buy her a present. Perhaps this is partly to do with the fact that she was linked entirely with the notion of Araby; both Mangans sister and Araby, of course, were different ways of the boy escaping the mundaneness of his surroundings. Partly also, it could well be to do with the brazen display and cold welcome we see from the young woman at the market – whilst Mangans sister is an example of idealised womanhood, here the boy has been confronted with womanhood in its actuality, as it is in the world. The third disillusionment we might read into the end, prompted by the religious undertone we have already noted throughout the story, is a loss of faith. If Mangans sister represented the virgin mother, and Araby some kind of paradise, then the boys disillusionment can also be connected to Joyces disillusionment with the Catholic faith, or indeed, with faith in general. As the light falls on the bazaar, the boy seems to blame himself (and his vanity) for being at the heart of all the illusions of which he has been divested. Here the facet of personality we identified before – his lack of introspection, and his tendency to filter everything through his own personality, link together with the end of his faith. He sees that both Araby, Magdans sister and, perhaps, his religious faith, were all the products of him self and his need for their illusions. By the end of the story he has to face this fact, that he has deceived himself. I think, the most important thing I took away from “Araby” then is how it treats the question of faith. However, it is not didactic – I do not think I will be less ready to create illusions for myself because of the text, nor more likely to have faith in things that I wouldnt have before. The story doesnt work on a moral level, it works on an emotional one – the things are presented before us and we are not asked to judge the boy, but to feel that we too have had feelings like him. Everyone in their lives must have at sometime felt the pain of being disillusioned and the anger and frustration this can incur. If “Araby” does teach us one thing, though, it is a way of reading which is less concerned with the surface and digs deeper into ordinary events. He has certainly achieved his aim to, “out of the dreary sameness” find “a measure of dramatic life.” It is difficult to tell whether my previous knowledge of Joyce enables a completely value-free judgement of “Araby”. Our view of such a simplistic story is always going to be tempered by the fact that it has been written by an author famous for the complexity of his work (particularly his most famous work Ulysses and his famously unreadable final work, Finnegans Wake). We tend to ask ourselves: what am I missing, surely there is something more to this simple story if it has been written by James Joyce. However, it is also intrinsic to the text (and if we didnt know that Joyce had written it, this would still be true) that “Araby” invites us to look deeper into it, it purposefully poses questions that we, the readers, need to use our interpretative facilities to answer. Equally, I may have been less ready to interpret the story from a Catholic or religious if I did not know aspects of Joyces history and other works. However, this should not be seen as a negative. I believe that anything which increases the possibilities afforded by a text to mean something new (whether it be details drawn from Joyces life, my own life, or from anywhere else) is a good thing. Our enjoyment of literature can only be increased by increasing the possibilities of our interpretation and the spectrum of meanings that a piece of fiction can create. Works Cited Joyce, James. Dubliners. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche, eds. London: Garland Publishers, 1993. -------. Critical Writings. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann eds. London: Viking Press, 1959. -------. Letter to Curran, July, 1904. Letters of James Joyce, volume 1 edited by Stuart Gilbert, volumes 2 and 3 edited by Richard Ellmann. (Viking Press, 1966). Richards, Bernard. “Joyces Epiphany”. Mr. Baulds English. Originally printed in The English Reivew.  Stein,William Bysshe. "Joyces Araby: Paradise Lost". Perspective. X11, No. 4 (Spring 1962). Read More