Dubliners: Araby

Passage: "I watched my master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play."


Joyce uses the ongoing theme of the protagonist's struggle to grow up; evident in The Sisters, An Encounter, and Araby. In the passage above, the protagonist has an epiphany like experience in his classroom. This epiphany is foreshadowed and supported in The Sisters, and Araby. In The Sisters, Joyce uses the death of Rev. James Flynn to put the protagonist at war with himself, and to see reality for what reality is; increasing the inevitability of an epiphany. In An Encounter, Joyce uses the Mid Western motif to echo the protagonist's striver to grow up, which is balked by the the protagonist's immature escape through childish literature. "I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life", since the protagonist has found love, he puts on as if he has found the true meaning of life, or "desire". The protagonist refers to "serious work of life" as "ugly monotonous child's play." By demeaning "serious work" to "child's play" the protagonist misleads the reader into truly believing he is progressing.


In Araby, the protagonist has found love. Love- a moving, light, florid subject- is contradicted by Joyce's tone. "When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners." This characteristic of the setting sets up Joyce's repeated use of words like: "dark", "figure", and "shadow". Mangan's sister is never fully observed, she is always described as a "brown figure", or always illuminated by lamplight. This use of illumination and vague figure contributes to the intangibility of the relationship the protagonist has with the girl; always observing her through windows, or from afar, never seeing her straight forward, always via illumination from surrounding light. "I was thankful that I could see so little", the quote echoes Joyce's "dark", "shadowy", unclear tone, and, furthermore, proves the protagonist's inability to mature.