thesis statement of araby

A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Araby’ is one of the early stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners , the 1914 collection of short stories which is now regarded as one of the landmark texts of modernist literature. At the time, sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).

And yet ‘Araby’ shows just what might have initially baffled readers coming to James Joyce’s fiction for the first time, and what marked him out as a brilliant new writer.

But before we get to an analysis of ‘Araby’ (which can be read here ), a brief summary of the story’s plot – what little ‘plot’ there is. You can read the story here .

Plot summary

In summary, then: ‘Araby’ is narrated by a young boy, who describes the Dublin street where he lives. As the story progresses, the narrator realises that he has feelings for his neighbour’s sister and watches her from his house, daydreaming about her, wondering if she will ever speak to him. When they eventually talk, she suggests that he visit a bazaar, Araby, on her behalf as she cannot go herself.

The boy plans to buy her a present while at Araby, but he arrives late to the bazaar and, disappointed to find that most of the stalls are packing up, ends up buying nothing.

‘Araby’ is marked by dead-ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere. The street on which the young narrator lives, North Richmond Street, is ‘blind’: i.e. a cul-de-sac or dead-end street. The narrator does go to the bazaar, Araby, but ends up turning up too late and doesn’t buy anything. His feelings for his female neighbour don’t lead anywhere: this is a romantic story in which boy and girl do not get together. Disappointments, dead ends, everywhere.

Like many of the stories in Dubliners , ‘Araby’ is marked, then, by plotlessness, by ordinariness, by describing mood and setting over action or exciting plot developments. As with the other early tales in Dubliners , ‘Araby’ is narrated in the first person by its principal character.

Joyce arranged the 15 stories in Dubliners so that they move from childhood to late middle age, progressing through the human life span more or less chronologically.

We might ask what advantage the child’s-eye view here creates. Like the narrator of the opening story from the collection, ‘The Sisters’ , the narrator of ‘Araby’ lives with his aunt and uncle. (Where are the parents? Have they emigrated, leaving the children to be looked after by relatives while they go to America in search of money and a better life? Have they died?)

But he is our voice through the story, and the other characters – with the notable exception of the girl he is infatuated with – are kept at arm’s length. There is a simplicity and innocence to his voice, describing what it feels like to experience the pangs of first love, but there is also a knowing voice at work too.

One of the most remarkable things about ‘Araby’, and one which deserves closer analysis, is the style. Style is, in a sense, everything with James Joyce: every word is used with care and towards the creation of a very deliberate effect, and no two stories in Dubliners use quite the same style or for identical reasons.

As the critic Margot Norris has observed in an analysis of ‘Araby’, the narrator describes his disappointments (failing to talk to the girl he likes at first; then, once he has spoken to her, failing to get her a gift at the Araby bazaar) in such a way as to compensate for the frustrations of real life by offering, in their place, the beauty of language.

This is there in the exoticism of the story’s title, ‘Araby’, and what it describes, a bazaar: both ‘Araby’ and ‘bazaar’ being terms which conjure the otherness and excitement of the place (based on a real travelling bazaar named Araby, which visited Dublin in 1894), in stark contrast to the more usual English-language term, ‘market’. (Note how the narrator refers to his aunt going ‘marketing’ at one point: ‘marketing’ is what people do when they need to perform household chores like shopping for groceries; but going to Araby or the bazaar is an event, a treat.)

Consider, in this connection, the narrator’s description of the impact seeing his beautiful neighbour has on him:

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

This has a peculiar effect on him:

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. 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. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

This is a true but also heightened in its romanticism: true because it captures what it is to be in love with a special person, especially when in the first flushes of adolescence.

But it is also romantic in the extreme because of the religious and courtly idea (nay, ideal) of love present in that idea of being the girl’s cupbearer (‘I bore my chalice’), the crying (but then, the disarmingly direct parenthetical admission of not knowing why), and the romantic idea of Old Ireland inscribed in that harp, which also carries a frisson of the erotic (with the girl’s words and gestures acting like the finger’s touches all over the boy’s body).

There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories which repay close analysis for the way the young narrator romanticises, but does not sentimentalise, the feeling of being in love, perhaps hopelessly. ‘Araby’, then, is a story about frustration and failure, but it ends on a note of ‘anguish and anger’, without telling us what will befall the narrator and the girl who haunts his dreams. Like many a modernist story, it is open-ended even when, like the street where the narrator lives, it appears to have reached its dead end.

About James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most important modernist writers of the early twentieth century. His reputation largely rests on just four works: a short story collection Dubliners (1914), and three novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).

For more discussion of James Joyce, see our analysis of Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’ , our commentary on ‘The Sisters’ , our summary of ‘Clay’ , and our introduction to free indirect speech .

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4 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’”

Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce's 'Araby' | collect magazine

The effect of reading Dubliners as a very young man has never left me. The ‘plotlessness’ of the stories, at the time, left me bewildered, but over the years I came to admire the style and indeed to prefer it to tacky ‘sting-in-the-tale’ or moralistic stories. my own collection of short stories is highly influenced by Joyce’s collection though not every story is plotless and, it goes without saying, my writing is a pale reflection of this great Irishman’s work. Thanks to your posts I’ve ordered the book (I think I read my brother’s copy all those decades ago) and I’m looking forward to reading it again and writing about my thoughts!

Hi – nice commentary on Araby which I’ve loved reading as part of The Dubliners several times. Interesting the way you’ve hit on the “dead ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere.” I don’t think I ever noticed that.

I did notice the boy was almost paralyzed about doing anything about the up-scale girl – like other characters in other stories – like Dubliners in Ireland at the time.

I noticed the windows in almost every story with the characters either looking out at what they want or in at it, but not being where what they want is. (Pastries in another early story but elsewhere.) Sometimes there aren’t even any windows and the players are really trapped in their views (politics, religion). It’s the same theme, desire and frustration. There are so many ways to read these stories by Joyce – things to find, to interpret, to see. https://beckylindroos.wordpress.com/012011-2/2012-2/102012-2/dubliners/

Pingback: The Best James Joyce Stories Everyone Should Read | Interesting Literature

Literary Analysis of 'Araby' by James Joyce

Categories: Araby James Joyce

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Published: Apr 11, 2022

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Works Cited

Joyce, James. “Araby.” Literary Cavalcade, vol. 52, no. 6, Mar. 2000, p. 21. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.macewan.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=2813357&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Should follow an “upside down” triangle format, meaning, the writer should start off broad and introduce the text and author or topic being discussed, and then get more specific to the thesis statement.

Provides a foundational overview, outlining the historical context and introducing key information that will be further explored in the essay, setting the stage for the argument to follow.

Cornerstone of the essay, presenting the central argument that will be elaborated upon and supported with evidence and analysis throughout the rest of the paper.

The topic sentence serves as the main point or focus of a paragraph in an essay, summarizing the key idea that will be discussed in that paragraph.

The body of each paragraph builds an argument in support of the topic sentence, citing information from sources as evidence.

After each piece of evidence is provided, the author should explain HOW and WHY the evidence supports the claim.

Should follow a right side up triangle format, meaning, specifics should be mentioned first such as restating the thesis, and then get more broad about the topic at hand. Lastly, leave the reader with something to think about and ponder once they are done reading.

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Home › British Literature › Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

Analysis of James Joyce’s Araby

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 6, 2022

One of James Joyce’s most frequently anthologized works, “Araby” is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners , which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as “stories of my childhood.” Like its predecessors, “The Sisters” and “An Encounter,” “Araby” tells the story of an unfortunate fall from innocence, as a young boy comes to recognize the sorry state of the world in which he lives. On the whole, Joyce’s home city is not kindly portrayed in these stories; he set out in Dubliners to produce what he called “a moral history of my country,” with a particular focus on the supposed “centre of paralysis,” Dublin itself. “Araby” and the other stories of Dublin’s youth are tales of initiation into this gray world.

As is the case with most of the stories in Dubliners, “Araby” takes its inspiration from remembered fragments of the author’s own childhood, including the Joyce family’s sometime residence on Dublin’s North Richmond Street, the Christian Brothers’ School that Joyce and some of his siblings briefly attended, and the “Araby” bazaar that passed through the city in May, 1894, when Joyce would have been 12 years old. Yet although Joyce’s life is deeply woven into his art, neither “Araby” nor any of his other works are merely autobiographical. These remembered elements come together in a story of a young boy in the intense grip of his first love, who imagines himself dispatched on a romantic quest by his beloved, only to realize in the end that his romantic notions were the naive fantasies of a child.

The dismal state of Joyce’s Dublin is suggested in part by the gloomy atmosphere of the story. We are twice reminded in the opening moments that North Richmond Street is “blind.” At its dead end is an empty house, and along one side is a school whose description likens it to a prison. The “brown imperturbable faces” of the other houses suggest a neighborhood of pious moralists keeping each other under constant surveillance. The young boy’s own home is redolent of a past that persists in a stale and unpleasant form: The “air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms.” The house’s former tenant, a priest who passed away there, has left numerous uninspiring reminders of himself, from the rusty bicycle pump in the garden to the “old useless papers” scattered about the place. The narrator hints that the old man was at home among the street’s “brown imperturbable faces” when he tells us that the supposedly charitable old man left all of his money to unspecified “institutions” and only the furniture of his house to his sister.

“Araby” is set in the short days of winter, whose cold and dark further underscore its gloomy atmosphere. Throughout, light contends weakly with an encroaching darkness. The boys’ evening play takes place among houses “grown sombre” and beneath a violet sky toward which “the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns.” As the boy arrives at the nearly empty bazaar in the story’s closing moments, the lights are turned off in the gallery of the hall, leaving him “gazing up into the darkness.” Amid the persistent gloom, however, stands the radiant object of the boy’s devotion, Mangan’s sister, “her figure defined by the light.”

The young boy’s ability to see dazzling light in the midst of overwhelming darkness is a function of the romantic idealism that is gradually stripped from him by his decidedly unromantic world. Even the scattered leavings of the dead priest, which include Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance The Abbot , together with the memoirs of the adventurous criminal-turned-detective, Eug ne Fran ois Vidocq, afford him fuel for his romantic imagination. Until the story reaches its sad conclusion, the boy is able to keep the darkness at bay, running happily through the darkened street with his young friends and transforming the clamor of the market on a Saturday evening into the backdrop for his imagined knight’s quest. There he imagines “that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”; however, the boy’s adventure-story version of his world is challenged by the songs of the street singers, with their allusions to O’Donovan Rossa and other reminders of “troubles in our native land.” The boy imagines his adventurous life despite the political troubles whose effects are felt and sung all around him. For a while, he imagines himself able to transcend such concerns and inhabit a thrilling realm of heroism and perfect love.

However, in the end his world will not sustain these happy illusions. The name of the Araby bazaar promises an Eastern exoticism entirely absent from the tawdry affair he finally experiences. Having imagined himself a questing knight, the boy encounters in Araby his Chapel Perilous, a defiled temple where “two men were counting money on a salver,” and his heroic selfimage crumbles during his encounter with the young woman at the stall he visits, who clearly regards him as a young nuisance. He witnesses in the flirtatious but shallow exchange between the young woman and the two gentleman a version of love considerably less operatic than the devotion that brought him to Araby, and he comes to see himself as a much smaller being than the gallant hero who undertook a sacred quest for his beloved, regarding himself in the final moment “as a creature driven and derided by vanity.”

In recounting the boy’s journey from passionate innocence to jaded cynicism, Joyce employs a narrative technique that is subtle but effective. The story is told from a first-person retrospective point of view that enables us to perceive two distinct but intimately related voices in the narration: that of the devoted young boy able to imagine himself a knight-errant “in places the most hostile to romance” and that of the subdued older man, recalling his younger self with an ironic detachment born of disappointment. The narration brings us inside the mind of the youthful lover, perplexed and overwhelmed by emotions that he can interpret only in the languages he knows: that of religious devotion and the stories of adventure and romance. Throughout, though, we are reminded that the young boy’s “confused adoration” is being recalled by his older and sadly unconfused self. The gloomy opening description of North Richmond Street, with its houses “conscious of decent lives within them,” gazing at each other “with brown imperturbable faces,” clearly reflects the perspective of the older man rather than that of the boy who careened through the same street in play. And the explicit judgment in the narrator’s recollection that “her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood ” (emphasis mine) reflects an ironic self-perception that the young boy does not at that moment have. These two voices eventually converge in “Araby” ’s closing paragraph, when the narrator declares, “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” revealing the origin of that ironic perspective in the moment of his sad fall from romance to cynicism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 1959. Revised edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gifford, Don. Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Joyce, James. Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Edited by Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Penguin USA, 1996.

Analysis of “Araby” by James Joyce Essay

Araby, by James Joyce, is the story of a young boy from a humble background, experiencing the first flush of love. When the object of her affection, “Mangan’s sister” expresses her desire to go to Araby , and her inability to go there, he gallantly offers to get something for her. His feelings for “Mangan’s sister” and his desire to go to Araby for her sake form the core of the story.

The opening paragraphs tell us about the narrator’s background as it paints a dark and dreary picture of his neighborhood. The reference to the fact that the priest who lived in the house before them had left the furniture of the house to his sister, suggests that the family could have used the furniture had it been available. There are several other references to the humble background of the narrator as he talks about the neighborhood in which he played which had ‘dark dripping gardens” and “odors arose from ashpits”.

From here the narrative moves on to the narrator’s infatuation with “Mangan’s sister”. The narrator and his friends are young boys who still find enjoyment in playing around in the dirt and filth of the neighborhood and the harsh realities of life have still not touched them. But obviously, they are growing up and becoming aware of their surroundings as well as their sexuality. “Mangan’s sister” is probably the only girl with whom he had ever exchanged “a few casual words”. So, as the narrator is outgrowing his boyhood and entering his adolescence, it is natural that his first crush would be on the only girl who has as yet entered his consciousness. His various emotions and actions, like following her at a distance to imagining her in the weirdest of places, only further intensify his infatuation as he is unable to express his feelings. The boyishness of his emotions is betrayed when he resorts to prayer to get her to talk to him.

Mangan’s sister’s first interaction with the narrator introduces us to the bazaar called Araby . When she expresses her strong desire to go to the bazaar and her inability to go there, the narrator takes it upon himself to go there and buy a gift for her. The focus of the story now shifts to the narrator’s obsession with going to Araby . Here once again we see the boyishness of the narrator’s character. Until now we had seen his obsession with Mangan’s sister and how he could only think of her. But now this obsession and focus shift to Araby . This boyishness of the narrator must be noted since as the story progresses we see him getting disillusioned.

After the narrator had carefully planned his evening out to Araby, the delay in his uncle’s return from work temporarily brings uncertainty to his plans. However, his aunt allows him to go alone to Araby, even at the late hour. Until now, the narrator had a very exotic impression of Araby. The fact that his uncle is reminded of the poem “ The Arab Farewell to his Steed” when the narrator mentions Araby , suggests that he thought that the bazaar was an Arab bazaar. Even the word “bazaar” is an Arab word and even the reader is misled into thinking that Araby is some kind of exotic marketplace. However, when he reaches the bazaar, he is disillusioned by what he sees. It is just an ordinary bazaar and a very expensive one at that. He has to pay a shilling just to get in and with what remains, he realizes that he cannot afford anything for Magnan’s sister. Thus the climax turns out to be an anti-climax, as the narrator’s dreams are blown away and he is reminded of his humble background.

This short story is told in the first person, entirely from the narrator’s point-of-view, hence we have a very limited understanding of the proceedings. A large part of the story is devoted to the narrator’s fantasies, first with “Magnan’s sister” and later with Araby . The narrative turns out to be a journey of self-discovery, as the young boy, probably for the first time, comes face to face with his financial standing and realizes the vanity of love.

Even though the narrator has to go to Araby to realize his financial realities, he was all along aware of it at some level. His preference for the book with “yellow leaves” and finding the “rusty bicycle-pump”, all point to his subconscious awareness of his family’s financial condition. Also, he does not have big dreams, his biggest wish is getting the love of his friend’s sister. He hopes to win this love through the simple gesture of buying her a gift from a bazaar where she wishes to go. His realization that even such simple pleasures are not from people coming from his socio-economic background is the crux of the story. This simple tale tells the readers about the harsh lives of the Dubliners by pointing out that for these people even love was a luxury.

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What could be a thesis statement for "Araby"?
In "Araby," a thesis statement could discuss all or any of the main themes (innocence and loss of innocence, alienation, the effect of religion on Irish society, and transformation as the boy ...
A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce's 'Araby'
Analysis. 'Araby' is marked by dead-ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere. The street on which the young narrator lives, North Richmond Street, is 'blind': i.e. a cul-de-sac or dead-end street. The narrator does go to the bazaar, Araby, but ends up turning up too late and doesn't buy anything. His feelings for his female ...
Literary Analysis of 'Araby' by James Joyce
Thesis statement: Joyce does not overtly make a statement about the Irish Orientalism, but the use of Eastern dictions, reference to the Araby bazaar, and other orientalist metaphorical imageries, ... In Araby, the most predominant way of establishing that is the diction. The use of terms Araby and bazaar is central to the idea of story.
"Araby" by James Joyce Literature Analysis
Introduction. Araby is a short story written by James Joyce; it focuses on an Irish teenage boy who is emerging from adolescent fantasies into the unkind realities of everyday life in his homeland. He doesn't reveal his identity but narrates his story in 1st person. For readers familiar with Joyce's literary work, it is obvious that he symbolizes the author.
Analysis of James Joyce's Araby
Analysis of James Joyce's Araby By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 6, 2022. One of James Joyce's most frequently anthologized works, "Araby" is the third in the trilogy of stories in his 1914 collection, Dubliners, which Joyce described in a letter to the publisher Grant Richards as "stories of my childhood."Like its predecessors, "The Sisters" and "An Encounter," "Araby ...
Araby by James Joyce: 8 Tips for a Literary Analysis
Though there are many other literary elements at play in Araby, the ones listed above are some of the most obvious, which also makes it simpler to find evidence of them within the text. Tip #5: Write an Effective Thesis Statement. Your thesis statement will give you an outline for where your paper needs to go.
Araby Summary & Analysis
Analysis. The story takes place in late 19th/early 20th-century Dublin, on North Richmond Street, a blind (dead-end) street on which stand several brown houses and the Christian Brother's school, a Catholic school for boys. The street is quiet, except when school ends and the boys play in the street until dinner.
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In "Araby" a boy ignores the reality of his bleak, winter surroundings and allows the word 'araby' to suggest the exciting summer world of Romance. But, if it is a land of spices he dreams of ...
Araby Analysis
Araby Analysis. "Araby" is a short story from Joyce's collection Dubliners, which was published in 1914. In the book, Joyce presents a realistic depiction of life in Dublin at the turn of ...
Analysis of "Araby" by James Joyce
Araby, by James Joyce, is the story of a young boy from a humble background, experiencing the first flush of love. When the object of her affection, "Mangan's sister" expresses her desire to go to Araby, and her inability to go there, he gallantly offers to get something for her. His feelings for "Mangan's sister" and his desire to ...
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by Charles Ko. The present study has been covered an overview and the analysis of the short story "Araby" to find out what makes the protagonist a lonely person, by plot points, characters and themes, and then it has been included a discussion about the gain of the protagonist from the journey. The story starts in the drab life that people ...
Araby
A young boy who is similar in age and temperament to those in "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" develops a crush on Mangan's sister, a girl who lives across the street. One evening she asks him if he plans to go to a bazaar (a fair organized, probably by a church, to raise money for charity) called Araby. The girl will be away on a retreat when ...
James Joyce Araby Thesis Statement
The document discusses the challenges of crafting a thesis statement about James Joyce's short story "Araby." It notes that "Araby" contains complex narratives, rich symbolism, and nuanced character development, making it difficult to analyze and encapsulate the essence of the story in a thesis statement. Some challenges identified are unraveling the layers of meaning in Joyce's avant-garde ...
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See key examples and analysis of the literary devices James Joyce uses in Araby, along with the quotes, themes, symbols, and characters related to each device. Allusions 2 key examples. Genre 1 key example. Imagery 2 key examples. Irony 1 key example. Mood 1 key example. Motifs 1 key example.
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Illusion and Reality in "Araby" In James Joyce's short story "Araby," written in 1905, but first published in 1914 in Dubliners (Merriam ebster's Encyclopedia of Literature, p. 611) a young boy experiences his first sexual awakening, and finds himself endlessly fantasizing about "Mangan's sister," who lives in a house near his own. As Joyce describes Mangan's sister, from the boy's perspective ...
Araby Critical Essays
But, clearly, whatever that thesis may be, one of its elements is the concept that in "Araby" are to be found, for the first time, ideas and themes which recur in Joyce's later work.
How to Write a Thesis Statement
Step 2: Write your initial answer. After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process. The internet has had more of a positive than a negative effect on education.
What are three thesis points about James Joyce's "Araby"?
A thesis regarding James Joyce's "Araby" could examine the themes presented within the text. "Araby" presents ideas on alienation, loneliness, and transformation. Therefore, a thesis statement for ...
Thesis Statement on Araby
Even though "Araby" was short, it was able to do justice to these issues by being so open to interpretation. One can look at this story at the surface or much deeper and even still, much is left unsaid. References to light, vision and beauty are extremely powerful, especially when it comes to discussing the issues that James Joyce did in "Araby ...
Araby Questions and Answers
What could be a thesis statement for "Araby"? What is the moral lesson of "Araby"? Why does the overheard dialogue at the bazaar trigger the climax in "Araby"?