Araby”, one of the most celebrated short stories in Joyce’s collection of stories Dubliners, reveals/portrays the state of mind of an unnamed adolescent in quest of ideal beauty, love and romance in the dull surroundings/ backdrop of the early twentieth century Dublin city, illumining the subconscious mind where dreams and desires lie dormant. The boy is the protagonist of the story. To evince/demonstrate/focus his psychological state, the author employs the method of stream of consciousness. The story does not have much physical action; most of the battles fought on the quest are psychological in nature and take place in the inner recesses of the protagonist. However, the surroundings/ surrounds where the boy is grown up/brought up are frustrating and …show more content…
So he is, he says, “confused” of/concerning both sacred and earthly love. Sometimes the girl is likened to a ‘chalice’, sometimes she is sensually desired. Actually, the fantasy that she has become in the boy’s mind works to undermine his religious faith and simultaneously creates confusing feelings of sexual desire.”1“Before realisation of his sexual interest in the girl, the young boy dwelt in a state of sexual innocence and naivete.”2 The boy, however, after eager waiting for Araby from where he dreams of buying the girl a suitably romantic gift, painfully discovers after going there that Araby is not the place that /what he has long dreamt of. He cannot buy anything from Araby/bazaar. His dreams remain unrealized. He is disillusioned and this disillusionment helps the boy come to a bleak realization: the incompatibility between the loveliness of the ideal and the bleakness/drabness of reality/ initiated into knowledge through a loss of innocence and a man who fully realizes the incompatibility between the beautiful and innocent world of the imagination and the very real world of