Thoughts on Joyce's Araby

What a wonderful telling of adolescent love, unrequited and embarrassing as we all remember it. The story resonates especially as it comes from another time, yet so clearly reads as utterly contemporary in its teenage angst. Can you imagine a young boy of thirteen or fourteen going off to one of our bazaars, the mall, and trying to find the perfect gift for a girl who doesn’t even love him. What to chose, what to get, what would convey all that needs conveying and yet, to do so with a heart wrenching understanding that the mission in and of itself is useless, that it is on borrowed money and borrowed time. What will she do? Say thank you? Kiss him on the check and go her way. The gift won’t render love, and the gift buying youth, on the verge of all that is manly and knowing, understands that.

I was also drawn to the recurring theme of detachment. Separateness, standing alone and apart. It begins with the description of the house in the first paragraph. We are told that there is an uninhabited house at the end of the street, detached from all the rest. The other houses seemingly stand together, united. As the youth goes through his story we see his other detachments. Detached from his shopping expedition with his aunt. He loses his sense of time and place and becomes caught up in the music; detached as he looks through the nearly closed blind staring at the door of his beloved, we see him there laying prone on the floor, his small body pressed into the rug on the ground, wistful and fully detached from his surroundings. And then finally at the bazaar, beaten by the heat of passion and delay, his task so near, yet so imperfect, and then of course the realization that his love is so not perfect, there is again a detachment from his purpose from his love that ends in his anguish and anger. I was left wondering about his anger. We are not really told what his anger is over, but all the possibilities are there. Is it the closing of the bazaar, the late homecoming of his uncle, the unruliness of his task, his inability to complete the task, or perhaps, it’s at himself, disgust for allowing such useless feelings of passion and love to detach him from himself, to drive him to this bazaar on a ridiculous mission of gift giving in exchange for unrequited loved.

As a short form fiction, the writing is deft and succinct. Each piece of the puzzle we are given creates a fully formed narration. I have not yet had the luxury of reading Joyce’s entire collection of short stories and wonder how each story in The Dubliners would complete the following or the preceding story. But on it’s own, Araby transports us to a different time and place, leaves us feeling as if we know the characters with credible and real emotions, hurts, desires. From a cursory research on the story, it seems that this is one that has been dissected over and over again, abounding in themes just ripe for English Literature 101! With college but a distant and sometimes smokey memory, it was wonderful to step back into the classroom and read this classic story.