Literary Analysis of Araby Free Essay Example

The setting of Araby is described within the first three small paragraphs; it conveys very vivid imagery as you would see it in the eyes of a young boy, noticing details of colors and textures of his surroundings. You soon get a sense of the narrator’s simple minded thinking as he is only a young boy. Going into the adolescent years, the narrator experiences new emotions and finds himself an immense love interest in his friend’s sister who lives down the street.

As he spends much of his time admiring him from a far, he finally speaks with her. After speaking with her he is filled with so much excitement that he finds the things had once found exciting are now boring and unsatisfying, the narrator tells us, “I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.

”(42). This portrays the future struggles he will encounter as he starts to lose his innocence through experience.

In the third paragraph is quite noticeable of how innocent the narrator actually is. As he develops a crush on his friend’s sister, even though he has never spoken a word to her, but admires her from afar, “we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street.”(40). The only contact he had with her is when his group of friends would go up to her doorstep as she was waiting for her younger brother, “We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her.”(40). But he was completely infatuated with her as he cannot help but describe the way she looked, “Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.”(40).

Every morning he would watch out of his front window waiting for her to leave for school. The moment she walked out her door, he was filled with joy and quickly gathered his things. He would follow her on his way to school like a lost, innocent, little puppy not letting her out of his site. He would do this every day, still not saying a word to her but maybe a couple simple mumblings, and yet he was madly in love with her.(40) He could not shake her from his head, in the oddest of places he would be picturing her in his head. He even says, “Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.”(41). And that, “My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom.”(41) In this line it is portrayed that he does not realize or understand the enormity of these new feelings he was having for this girl. His innocence is prevents him from knowing what this attraction for this girl means.

At last this girl of his dreams finally starts a conversation with him. She asks him if he would be going to the Araby, which is grand bazaar, and explains how she wants to go so badly, but she cannot due to prior obligations. Flabbergasted that she was talking to him, he did not know what to say. As she explained that she could not go, he quickly says, “’If I go,’ I said, ‘I will bring you something.’”(42). He says this in hopes that buying her a gift from the bazaar will make her interested in him. After talking to her he was filled to the brim with excitement, he has trouble sleeping because he cannot clear his mind of her and could not think of anything else but her. He tries to pass the following days quickly, despised doing school work, he even says, “. . . her image came between me and the page I strove to read.”(42).

As the day grew closer his excitement grew as well, for things now seemed dull, the author says, “I answered few questions in class. I watched my master’s face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play.”(42). The excitement in him is so extreme that he finds that he is completely aloof and jaded of the classroom. The only thing he thinks about is this girl and going to the bazaar. His thoughts make him blind to anything that is in front of him. Again his naïve innocence keeps him from seeing beyond his narrow minded path and looking outward beyond his own thoughts and doings.

Not thinking ahead, when he said, “’If I go,’ I said, ‘I will bring you something.’”(42), he did not realize that he had no money and had to ask permission if he may go to the bazaar. When he returned home that same night he asked his aunt for permission to go, she was shocked that he had asked, but agreed to it. The morning of his planned trip to the bazaar, he reminds his uncle that he is going to the bazaar and he needed money for the gift and the train fair. His uncle replied in a muttered and snappy tone, “’Yes, boy, I know.’”(42). As the narrator returned home from school for supper, his uncle had not yet arrived. The narrator waited and waited trying to pass the time until his uncle returned until his aunt said, “’I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.’”(43), but then, “At nine o’clock I heard my uncle’s latchkey in the hall door. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.”(43-44).

After some pestering at his uncle from his aunt, the narrator was given the money. When he had finally arrived at the bazaar it was mostly closed for the train had taken up quite some time. The only stall that he sees open has “porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets”(45), which has nothing of interest to him, the vendor sees him and crudely asks him if he needed anything, he kindly denies. As he looked upon the many items and as the lights are being shut off above him, he turns and walks away. As he is now standing in complete darkness for the last light had now been shut off, standing in the complete darkness he has an epiphany. He realizes that he has been thoughtless to believe that the girl would be attracted to him. He will always be thwarted in his path in life. He sees the Araby as what it really is, just a gaudy place to sell things. There is nothing glamorous or even appealing about it. He realizes that he had set himself up for disappointment.

As the narrator is pained and frustrated as stated in the last line of the story, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”(46). We feel the narrator’s frustration begin to build as he has to wait for his uncle, and then the tardiness arriving at the bazaar which in turn leads to not buy anything for nothing of interest is open anymore, his dream is broken. With all of this falling apart so quickly, he soon realizes that he had been blinded and fooled himself into this idea that this elaborate scheme of buying a gift for this girl will make her like him.

He is blinded by his innocence and unfortunately losses his innocence through experiencing all of these struggles to try and satisfy these new feelings of his only to realize his struggles were worthless. Also because we do not find out the name of the friend’s sister, this makes the idea of her so much more distant and unreachable. We view her much like the narrator does, as a far and mysterious person who we don’t know much about. When the narrator’s dreams of pleasing her were crushed, the whole situation made sense in the end; he, after all, did not know much about her.