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Araby By James Joyce

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“Images or words in the conscious mind take on an ominous significant…incidents swell with meaning.” Edmond Wilson once said this about James Joyce’s literary work. His observation about Joyce is backed up in the short story “Araby”. In the story an average Irish boy who is stricken by infatuation of his friend Mangan’s sister. James Joyce uses literary devices to connect people to the gloom of life in Dublin and how that effects desire.
James Joyce’s work is heavily influenced by the years he spent in Dublin, Ireland. He was born in 1882 and raised in Dublin. Joyce was the oldest in a family of ten children which may have contributed to a theme of isolation and individual unimportance in his work. Threw his youth he often longed for a freer …show more content…

The boy finds some books on the floor that belonged to the priest that died. One was a historical novel and another a catholic manual, but his favorite was The Memoirs of Vidocq. The memoir is the exiting life of a French man who blurs the line between law enforcement and criminal. Although the boy’s favorite is merely based on the yellow color of the pages, it is clear the author wants the reader to see the longing for adventure and the boy’s rejection of old ideas. Knowing that Joyce ran away to Paris and sees it as a place for these two things makes it abundantly clear that the favorite book choice is no accident and the boy desires freedom and …show more content…

The imagery associated with the town’s living space is very bleak. The street the story is set in is “blinded”, meaning that it was a dead end. In the context blinded is used it means the street is a dead end. This signifies the lack of a future for our narrator. Even though they are attached and in close proximity to each other there is a feeling of separation. “An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of the decent lives with in them, gazed at one another with brown imterpuable faces.” This quote stresses how distant and unimportant people are in Dublin through personification of the

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