What Is The Theme Of Reality In Araby

Araby is a story filled with fantasies that the narrator has about the world outside of which he lives. The narrator lives through a life changing experience which alters him into a completely different person. The narrator comes face to face with reality, a reality which he has not been prepared for. Araby a story of initiation, an adventure that ends in failure. The narrators failed adventure causes him to gain an inner cognizance, which results in his first taste of manhood. The narrator’s views of himself and of the beauty that he thought would be the Araby caused him to become out of touch with reality. These views and fantasies were shaped by the neighborhood in which he lives and the culture which he is surrounded by. The narrator thought that there had to be more to life than what he experienced every day. The narrator became blinded by what he thought and he just knew that the adventure that he was about to take would be everything that he had wished for. However, his adventure forever changes him.

The narrator describes his neighborhood as being blind (Joyce 154). All of the houses with the exception of one faced each other with brown imperturbable faces (Joyce 154). The neighborhood was quiet, the only thing bad that had ever happed there was the death of the person who had lived in the narrator’s current home (Joyce 155). The neighborhood was described in a manner in which there was no excitement. The narrator is misled in his thinking because of this dullness and blindness that he sees every day. His ideas about the Araby are constructed from the ugliness that he always sees. The thoughts that there is more to life than this dullness caused these fantasies of beauty and excitement to flourish above