Araby, one of the fifteen short stories collected in the book Dubliners written by James Joyce, talks about a boy’s infatuation, from first-person viewpoint, with a girl who is a sister of his friend Mangan. The boy often plays with Mangan and other boys after school and attends an all-boy Catholic school, like most schoolboys his age. A daily interrupter of their play is Mangan’s sister, who calls Mangan inside for tea. As the boy grows older, he finds the physical appearance and the body shape of Mangan’s sister attractive and begins to be infatuated with her. One day, the boy meets Magan’s sister on the doorstep, saying that she wants to go to the Araby Bazaar, but she has an errand to run and she cannot go. To impress her and get her attention, the boy tells Mangan’s sister that he would buy something for her. He needs the money from his uncle for the bazaar. But with his uncle coming home late because of drinking, the boy arrived at the event late and most of the stalls were closed. While being disappointed and angry, the boy sees a young woman flirting with two young men, which pulls him back from his imagination to reality. The boy finally realizes that his affection for Mangan’s sister was only the desire for change. Although Araby is a short story, it suggests to readers some valuable lessons and leads readers to think about issues regarding imagination vs reality, idealization, and coming of age.
While imagination allows people to explore endless possibilities and wonder in a fantasy world, reality grounds people in the rules of society and pulls them back to the practical world. Specifically, imagination is the action of forming new ideas, images, or concepts of external items that people encounter and are not present to their senses; on the contrary, the reality is the state of things as they actually exist. Despite the differences, imagination and reality are deeply interconnected. The boy has a crush on Mangan’s sister because of her physical appearance. But everything is just from his imagination because he never has any understanding or interaction with her. The boy would like to impress Mangan’s sister by giving her some gifts so he went to Bazaar, which he imagined to be an Eastern-Style Arabic romantic event where people buy exotic products with very much cultural value. But it turns out to be just a shallow commercialized version, with people often talking in English accents. People have imagined creating new things, but people can imagine a bit too much, and have consequences since they will face disappointment when the things don’t meet their expectations. The author James Joyce depicts childhood as filled with excitement, fun, and imagination. The boy believes these feelings will carry into his adulthood, but instead, he is disillusioned. He finds that adult life is mundane and disappointing, and he feels shame for thinking of romantic adulthood as shown in books. He imagines that the bazaar and adulthood will be exotic and exciting, but he is met with the truth that life is boring and often disappointing. He treats the request to buy something from the bazaar as a noble quest and sees himself as some kind of knight errant. It is only when he reaches the bazaar that he sees it, and his supposed love, he realizes the drab, insubstantial thing that it actually is and he finally realizes reality. People often imagine many things, but almost all of these things don’t turn out as they are imagined to, often because the dreams people construct aren’t even possible in reality or reality is too harsh on them. The contrast between imagination and reality and their interaction continually influence each other, facilitating personal growth and reevaluation of personal values.
Idealization, the process of representing something or someone as perfect in reality, often involves exaggerating the positive aspects and ignoring the negative aspects of the subjects. However, when the idealized person or things fails to meet the elevated expectations, the idealization, too often, could lead to disappointment, frustration, dissatisfaction, or a distorted perception of reality. The boy originally hoped that the market was fresh and new, so he could buy something valuable and exotic for Mangan's sister. But, he ends up buying nothing. His original idealization of the bazaar was shattered along with his love of Mangan’s sister, only to realize it wasn’t real. Before the boy played with his friends after school until their bodies “glowed”. After his infatuation with Mangan’s sister, he has no friends to play with. After falling in love with Mangan’s sister, he pays less attention to his elders, whether it is his schoolmaster, or his uncle and aunt. Here the ideal is close-connected with the idealism of beauty, the idealism of love, and the idealization of place. The boy sees Mangan’s sister as God, and prays to her, like how he treats god. He also views his love as his love for God. The boy idealizes Mangan’s sister thinking that it is the love in romantic stories, where there is chivalry. The boy’s dream girl herself is the embodiment of idealism, whereas, Araby is the representation of Eastern enchantment. Mangan's sister offers a mental escape from this world. He thinks about her in even the most hostile places to her romance and daydreams about her instead of doing his job at school. He seems to see that his own feeling of exotic love for Mangan's sister was equally just a mask, a false escape rather than a real journey to a new and distant place. He also realizes that he couldn't really escape to these exotic places. Both the market and Mangan's sister's love were vanity, a mistaken belief in his own specialness, his own uniqueness. And the fact that the Araby market exists, and that young men and women flirt in it to pass the time, suggests that even his desire to escape the everyday is itself common and everyday. The main reason why people idealize things is that they are often tied to the redundant and harsh reality. When people idealize things, people might end up having negative consequences. People idealize everything in their imagination, but consequences of idealization sometimes are detachment and loneliness, while disappointment also occurs because things may not turn out how they are supposed to be.
Coming-of-age, the transition from childhood to adulthood, characterizes various physical, emotional, intellectual, and social changes, embarking one’s self-discovery and gaining insights and deeper understanding about the world. In literature, coming-of-age is a journey that takes the protagonist from native to wise, from idealism to realist, and from immature to mature, which tends to emphasize internal dialogue over actions and are often set in the past. The author describes this story as a grown man looking back on his love with Mangan’s sister when he was just a boy. Before becoming infatuated with Mangan’s sister, the boy was an innocent normal school-age child. His life was not filled with mistakes, shortcomings, and everything was perfect in his mind. However, after going to the bazaar, he finally realizes that his love was not actually love, but vanity and a desire for change. When people are young, childhood is happy, worry-less, painless, and naive. But when they grow up, they realize adulthood is harsh, corrupted, and practical. The boy looks back at his childhood, and just like the author, he finally knows that his love wasn’t real and his decisions were foolish. The color of everything in Dublin is often described as gray or brown by the author, signifying that the author as a grownup is not satisfied with being Irish society at that time. Additionally, the ending of this story is a little disappointing, because when he went to the market, he didn’t buy anything. Another thought is that when people go to a place to buy something, they find that there is nothing that they want to buy.In Araby, the protagonist is growing up through his discovery of his sexuality, his sudden distance from his friends, and his increasingly rebellious attitude, however the protagonist’s new knowledge and maturity bring him discontent instead of fulfillment. At the end of the story, the narrator is left with nothing, with his crush not really his crush, having no friends, and being a bad student, thus having a bad reputation. Everyone experiences coming of age differently. When it takes place, one discovers new aspects of his identity, going on a process of personal growth, and acts with maturity.
Araby is a story that can be learned a lot from, whether it is becoming mature, imagination vs reality, or idealization. Through the boy’s infatuation with Mangan’s sister, we can learn that imagination is now always ideal, since some things can be imagined to an extent that makes it impossible to be real. The idealization of things can lead to other consequences, since after idealization comes detachment and disappointment with the reality and world. When people idealize things, they can become detached from the world and although there may be mental escape, the reality can be devastating. As one gets older, they become more mature and understand the world around them better through a process called coming of age. People often experience very pivotal experiences, such as war, famine, and economic loss. People often end with self-fulfillment, but Araby doesn’t because the boy finally realizes that all of this love was just vanity, and his own belief that he was more special.
Comments