James Joyce "Araby"
... it is essentially a dead end. The young boy’s house has the same symbolic meaning of death. In the second paragraph the boy explains his home by saying "the former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawning room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers" (Joyce 2492). The young boys house and neighborhood shows how he lives among death. Even though death and gloom is all around him, he will still discover the reality of disappointment. The young boy’s life inside his home is not any better than the street that he lives on. His life at home is another example of his world of disappointment. The young boy has fallen in love with a girl who lives next door to him. When she finally speaks to him he tells her that he is going to the bazaar in Araby and promises to bring something back for her. The young boy returns home and asked his aunt if he could go to the bazaar on Saturday night. Saturday morning he reminds his uncle of the bazaar and his uncle answered “yes boy, I know” (Joyce 2494). His uncle returns home late that night and had obviously forgotten about the boy wanting to go to the bazaar. This is the boy’s first encounter with disappointment. The young boy’s biggest awakening into disappointment occurs on the night he goes to the bazaar. Before going to the bazaar he has been living in a world of dreams and ideals but when he gets there he soon realizes that the world is full of disappointment and gloom. When he first gets to the bazaar he says “I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service” (Joyce 2495). After finding a stall that was open he procee...