Arifa Ghani Rahman ID: 123456789 ENG108: Composition Textual Analysis 3 28 February 2016 “Araby”: Failed Dreams or Something Else? James Joyce’s “Araby” is the story of a young boy so attracted to the opposite sex at a certain point in his life that he forsakes practicality and good sense in order to achieve the object of his “love” or “lust.” The young boy (so it seems from the description of school and the playground) in “Araby” is so obsessed by the object of his desires that he “had hardly any patience with the serious work of life.” He can only dream – about her. There is no indication that Mangan’s sister has any interest in him whatsoever except perhaps as one of the neighborhood kids. It seems as though the bazaar Araby becomes “splendid” because Mangan’s sister says it will be. However, when the boy finally manages to reach Araby, he is disillusioned by the darkness and the commonness of the items there. It has none of the enchanted Eastern magic he’d dreamed it would have. Even the people present are tawdry and uninterested. The young lady at the bazaar is flirting and does not bother with the boy too much. This scene, and the atmosphere of the place in general, awakens the boy to his senses and he realizes that he had been “a creature driven and derided by vanity.” His anger at himself stems from the discovery that his obsession with Mangan’s sister was meaningless. This is the point at which he matures into his adult self. The story is actually not so much about failed dreams as it is about disillusionment. The boy in “Araby” has no dreams. He only daydreams. Once he comes face to face with reality, these daydreams evaporate into darkness. The boy appears to come from a lower or lower middle class family. So, in spite of his being male and most likely white, race and gender don’t seem to make his situation very different from Sylvia’s or Rosaura’s from last week’s readings. The only difference is that the boy is not discriminated against because of his background. A conclusion we may draw from this is that economics or financial status matter more in deciding an individual’s outlook on life as well as how others view them.
