Do your eyes burn with anger and anguish when you have to read James Joyce's
Araby? If so, you're in the right place because today we're going to take a look
at some of the major points of this story, and by the end of the video
hopefully make it so you better understand the confusing ending
to this story. So, let's dive right into it. So the biggest frustration with this
story seems to be its lack of plot. And the plot can really be boiled down to:
boy sees girl, boy likes girl, boy tries to impress girl with buying her a
present, and instead boy doesn't buy anything and
just looks up at the ceiling in a sad fashion. Not much to go off of but James
Joyce isn't really interested in plot. He's much more interested in character.
And the narrator, even if the plot seems kind of anticlimactic, the narrator fuels
this story. And we know a lot about him. For one thing, he's a thinker, right? He's
an interesting character because he points out things for us - like his house -
a priest died in it and he knows what room the priest died in. He tells us
funny bits about like when he's going to the marketplace with his aunt and he
thinks he's a knight going through a gauntlet with a prize for this princess.
He notices things like his uncle's reaction from coming home from work: he
doesn't ask his uncle if he can go to the Araby right away because of the way
he takes off his shoes and puts his coat away and his keys and all that sort of
stuff. So he's very observant, he notices all these things. Speaking of his aunt
and uncle, he's also raised by them so he seems to be an orphan and we don't get a
lot of detail about this but certainly if you were writing a paper on this
story, that's a detail that Joyce wants you to know, and you can definitely
theorize about it, right? He doesn't have his parents to talk to and we don't know
what happened to them. Instead he's with his aunt and uncle who seemed to care a
lot about him but certainly don't quite get what he's going through at this
moment. And then of course what really fuels the story is he's the first of his
friends to fall for a girl. The story opens with him and his friends playing
outside. Near the end of this story his friends are still playing outside but
he's up in a window thinking about this girl who lives
across the street from him: the sister of one of his friends. So his friends are
still going on with their kind of early childhood life and he's moving into
adulthood and it's a strange confusing time for him which anyone over the age
of like thirteen or fourteen can probably relate to. It really seems to
set us up though for this Hollywood like story, but it doesn't go that way. Instead,
the way it goes, I think, is really interesting, but very confusing. So to
help us better understand that ending we need to think of the imagery that Joyce
is using. And what I did here is I marked out the dark or unseen like hiding,
blind imagery and the bright or visible images in the story. And I didn't get all
of them, but just from what I pointed out you can tell a couple of things: one
there's a lot more dark images in this story. But more interesting than that is
where they're at ( I marked paragraphs that's the numbers after the quotes and
sentences since everyone's probably going off a different edition) but if you
kind of count out the paragraphs you can see that the dark images start at the
beginning of the story and go all the way to the end of it, so they're varied
and they're continuous throughout. Whereas the light images are all concentrated
in one spot. And that spot is the mention or the actual interaction of this girl
our narrator is interested in. The first one is in paragraph three, the light of
her window, but the majority of them are in paragraph eight where she's described
as having a silver bracelet and there's light from the lamp and there's the
white curve of her neck and it lights up her hair and it lights up her hand and
her dress has a white border. So all these are very intentional images but the light
imagery stops. And at the end of our story, if you look at these ones, it's all
very dark, and it's the darkest images in the entire story so that's going to be
one key to understanding the ending. Before we get to that though we have to
take a look at one other character and that's the love interest: his friend's
sister. So, we don't get to know a lot about her, notice for one thing she
doesn't have a name, we're told that her name is a summons to
the narrator's foolish blood but we never get to know what that is.
And I don't know if that's because it's not important
or because he doesn't really know her or a combination of both, but one thing
he definitely doesn't know about her is what her plans are. Because a
huge thing back in paragraph 8, with all the light imagery, that is kind of
buried in there (almost so that the reader can almost miss it) is what she
wants to do with her life. Because we are told she cannot go to the Araby because
she has a retreat at her convent that weekend. And this is totally ignored by
our narrator, but if she has a retreat at her convent it means that she is going
to be a nun and if she is going to be a nun she is not going to date, so this guy
is so far out of his league in trying to date this girl. I mean he has not just
the fact that he doesn't know her or barely talks to her or that he's like 13
but also that she's made a vow to God to be celibate and this detail does not
deter him from trying to impress her by buying her something. And that really
sets up the ending quite well. So to understand these confusing last lines 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" to understand those we
need to understand every word because it's a very important line. So two words
you might not know just off the top of your head are "derided" which is to be
laughed at or insulted or to be made a fool by, so now we know that he sees
himself as someone who is motivated, driven and also laughed and made a fool
by and vanity. And if you don't know what "vanity" means it's, pride in one's own
appearance and achievements, and this is such an interesting ending to me because
it's not a "boy meets girl they fall in love happily ever after" it's "boy meets
girl, boy tries to do everything to get the girl, and then realizes he was a fool."
That he wasn't even in love with her...he was in love with the idea of her, or
maybe just what it made him feel like it (with no concern
to her feelings or her goals in life) And isn't that a story that we should have
more of in this world? And when he discovers this it's in conjunction with
the imagery- if you think back to those last images- the narrator is in complete
darkness when he utters this sentence. He's at this Araby, he's in a tent, and we
are told that the light in the tent is extinguished. And he stares up at the
ceiling of the tent from under it with no light when he says this. So now all
the light represented by the gir,l and maybe his hope of dating her or getting
to know her or whatever, is gone. He's staring into complete darkness; he's under
a tent with no light source so it's just a pitch-black, complete darkness. And I
think that really makes the ending make more sense. The imagery is very much tied
into the discovery, or the epiphany, that happens with the character. We know that
this is a reflection; the narrator is telling us about this event that
happened to him in the past; and all he understands, what he chooses to end with,
is this epiphany. This discovery that he was driven by vanity and it makes him
feel ashamed and it's something I think a lot of us learn when we fall for
someone for the first time. So I would just like to remind you when you're
frustrated by this story, if you were, that, yes, the plot seems kind of silly or
anti-climactic but the plot is just a means to the character; I think this is a
really fascinating character. One last thing to talk about is the title. If we
could return to that for a second...don't neglect to think about what the title
means. If you have to write about this it's titled Araby not someone's name, not
an event; it's the place where this epiphany happens and I think that really
helps focus us as readers and commenters on this story in terms of what we want
to say about it. So I hope that helped. If you have any other questions about the
story or anything English related, post them in the comments. Best of luck with
your papers or finals or tests or just better understanding of Irish literature. Thanks and maybe I'll see you next time. Bye!