James Joyce, in his short story Araby, tells the journey of a young boy on a quest to win the heart of a girl he likes. With the use of diction, color imagery, and symbols, he portrays a tragic story with a tragic hero. While the main character does not die at the end, he does meet a tragic destruction of who he was at the beginning of the story. This character shows Carl Jung’s archetypal theory of the shadow, the anima, and the persona. He also believed in individuation, which the lead character experiences at the end of the story.
Northrop Frye theorized that there were four types of literature, or four mythoi, that linked with the four seasons. These mythoi embody all of literature, or as he called it, monomyth. Joyce’s story, a tragedy, connects with the season of autumn. “In the autumn myth, the hero does not triumph but instead meets death or defeat.” (Dobie, 68). The journey of our hero is one of tragedy. He loses a part of himself when he decides to go on this quest to the bazaar. His character development is negative in the
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James Joyce uses the phrase “ran the gauntlet” to describe the main character and his friends playing between the houses. At a first glance, the audience would see the word gauntlet and assume it is the metal glove knights wore. Upon further research, the phrase Joyce uses actually has a Swedish origin that is a punishment where the victim runs between two lines of men as they strike him. The double meaning is interesting to use since the young boy the story follows imagines himself as a hero. There are other dictions choices that connect well with a quest including romance, ballad of troubles, chalice, an eastern enchantment, purpose of my journey, and magical. Arthurian stories contain magic, romance, and journeys with a goal. Chalices are gold cups for royalty. Ballads are poems that were popular in the later medieval period in the British