A Boy's Spiritual Journey

Life involves struggles between religious and romantic ideas. People become overwhelmed with feelings especially at young ages that they are unable to realize or make of any sense. The struggle in James Joyce’s “Araby” revolves between a confused boy’s religious interest and romantic devotion.

The narrator begins the story describing the street in which he resides with an ominous feeling. He sees, through blind eyes, what we have all experienced: the cold, hard reality of life. Through the eyes of the young narrator, life seems gloomy in the descriptions that portray his surroundings that Joyce uses throughout the story. The silent street where the boys play is described as being dark, with dark homes, dark muddy lanes, dark dripping gardens, dark odorous stables and odours arising from ash pits.

The first mention of light into this boy’s existence is when the light of the half-opened door defines Mangan sister’s figure. She is the light that he has yet to experience. She is representative of what he now searches to find. We can all relate to the young man’s experience; we idealize someone in our images, becoming obsessed with those experiences and soon everyday life becomes consumed with the images and thoughts of this one person. “Yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood ” (Sipiora 38). While on a trip to the market with his aunt, he imagines on this trip with the help of her image, that he carries a trophy safely through a crowd of enemies.

“Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand” (Sipiora 39). The words that Joyce uses to describe the way he feels of her, confused adoration, perfectly describes this young man’s thoughts. He is puzzled as to whether his feelings are of love, admiration, idolization, or even worship. This story has strong underlying religious tones. As the boy goes to the back drawing room where the former owner (a priest) died, it almost seems like an altar. In the drawing room where the boy masturbates, it seems that Joyce wanted to describe this scene as if the boy were merely doing a prayer of worship. “All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: `O love! O love!' many times” (Sipiora 39). Joyce makes us wonder as if the boy is unable to differentiate between sexual and religious feelings.

Once Mangan’s sister spoke to him about the upcoming bazaar and his promise to bring back some trinket for her, he is overwhelmed with images of her through the endless days until the bazaar. The thoughts of the upcoming bazaar possess his schoolwork, and then everyday life soon became child’s play. After much delay, the night of the bazaar arrives and his mission was about to begin. Once his drunken uncle arrived late, and with time pressing, he was finally on his way to the bazaar. He endured another delay in his mission with the train leaving the train station. He was alone in this special train due to the porters turning away a crowd at the station that wanted to board, as if this trip he needed to go alone.

At last, he arrives at the sign displaying the magical name. He rushes around looking for a sixpenny entrance but giving up patience and paying instead a shilling. Here like before in his life was darkness that surrounded the hall but also a silence like a church after service. As he went up to one of the stalls he found it hard to remember his purpose of coming to this bazaar in the first place. While he was standing in the middle of the hall, with one side of him in the light and the other side in darkness, a sudden realization occurred to him; he saw himself as he gazed to the darker side as a creature driven and derided by vanity, someone who took pride in themselves with a self-importance and egotism. He felt sorrow that he acted this way.

The ending finally reconciles the religious undertone throughout this story. My interpretation of this story was that the darkness that was lurking around everywhere was evil and temptation and that the light was salvation and reference to God. In the beginning of the story the boys life Joyce uses references of the “dark” to show the boys blindness to the reality of life’s temptations. His confusion with thinking Magan’s sister is the “light” causes him to misjudge his feelings both sexual and religious. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Sipiora 41). The boy was blind to the temptations of the world but now he can see clearly.

Sipiora, Phillip. “Araby.” Reading and Writing about Literature. Pearson Education, Inc, 2002. 38-41.