3.3 The Divergence of Religion 5

3.3.1 The Priest 6

3.3.2 Araby and Things that Happened Here 6

4. The Ways that Reinforce the Theme and Character 7

4.1 By Using the Chosen Details 7

4.1.1 The Death of the Priest 7

4.1.2 The Books 7

4.1.3 The Difficulties on the Way to Araby 8

4.2 By Using Strong Contrasts 8

4.2.1 Darkness and Light 8

4.2.2 The Contrast of the Boy’s Attitude to Love at the Different Stages 9

4.3 By Using Religious Images 9

4.3.1 Wild Garden 9

4.3.2 Chalice 9

4.3.3 Araby 10

5. Conclusion 10

Works Cited 12

 1. Introduction

1.1 The Main Content of the Story

“Araby” tells a story of a young boy’s disillusionment with life as he experiences his first love of a girl, but eventually he feels disappointed about the love and life when he finds that reality is not what he expects. 

Furthermore, the boy’s experience is not only about youth’s encounter with first love. Rather, it is a description of a continuing problem all through life: including the incompatibility of the ideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, and the bleakness of reality.

The story seems to tell a boy’s first love but actually it reveals several aspects of the whole society. On one level, “Araby” is a story of a boy’s quest for the ideal. Although the quest ends in failure, results in an inner awareness and his first step into manhood. On another level, the story consists of a man’s remembered experience, for a man who looks back to his particular experiences of intense meaning and insight tells the story in retrospect.

Thus the pergence between fantasy and reality becomes the true subject, and description of the difference of relationship, love, and religion reinforces the dilemma the boy lives in and theme of idealistic dreams vanishing eventually in cold reality. 

1.2 Literature Review

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-guade of the early 20th century.Whatever and wherever Joyce wrote it was the Dublin of his youth and young manhood that provided the central substance of his work. Joyce, as a child and as a student, roams the streets and becomes familiar with the oddest corners of the city. Dublin has impressive public places, dignified architecture, and a fine cultural life, yet it is small enough for a sense of community at its center here, for the inhabitants to know one another, and for the city’s characters to be a matter of interest to all. 

James Joyce’s short story “Araby” is superficially the simplest of the first three stories of childhood disillusionment. The young boy is living with his uncle and aunt in a cul-de-sac in a house once tenanted by a priest and containing faded relics of his library. What brings a captivating excitement into the drab surroundings is the sister of a neighboring playfellow, the boy’s love. But after the boy goes through several things about love, religion, the relationship between people, the difference between the boy’s dream and reality makes him disappointed and full of anger.