James Joyce’s “Araby” — An Eternal Quest for Beauty

James Joyce’s “Araby” is a sensual tale of adolescence, an adolescent’s search for beauty and need. “Araby” is about mood and aspiration. It is about self recognition and confidence to carry on which in today’s world we all are struggling with. In “Araby” the boy will recognise the illusion he has loved. The artificial illumination which his eyes thought to be brown hallow. Joyce didn’t give any name to the protagonist of the story. He is ‘the boy’ to the readers. We can say that through this “Araby” has reached its universality as today also we can relate with it. Adolescence is an inevitable part of every human’s life and so the journey also has an eternal tone.

The boy whom we come across is a sharp, intelligent, acutely sensitive and possesses the imagination of a poet. He lives in North Richmond Street of Dublin. The ‘blind’ North Richmond Street broods over its past glory. It’s past magnificoes casts a shadow on Dublin. Joyce’s boy hero finds his jaundiced existence in yellow leaves. Suddenly across this shadow the boy gets the touch of love. Life becomes for him either the petty existence or the blend of love held out by Mangan’s sister. Overwhelmed by this new feelings the boy begins to inhabit in the ‘back drawing room’ whose past tenant the priest had died and lost his inhabitants on the people’s mind and life , to restore the ‘rusty bycycle pump’ in the ‘wild garden’ to bring back the mood, magnificence of Dublin. Unfortunately the bicycle is ‘rusty’ which signifies the hollowness of Mangan’s sister. For his new feelings the boy separates himself from his companies. For him Mangan’s sister becomes less a person and more a personal object to reveal his feelings. Eager to decipher this never before felt emotion the boy watches every swing of her.

In Mangan’s sister resides his all desires, she is his dream endorses, in her is his identity. To the boy she is like religion and so he even starts to imagine her in places hostile to love. He watches for his savior everyday “on the front parlour watching her door”.

The boy idealises Mangan’s sister but his love is not platonic. Eager to experience his love he wants to destroy the veil that shadows his love. He wants to recognise her identity and her physical charm is one of them which intrigues and attracts him. the boy’s love is dependent on Mangan’s sister’s reciprocation. Overwhelmed by the feelings of young love he thinks little about future. He never talks with her but he does not stop to think about her.

At last she spoke to him. For days the boy rehearsed how to speak, how to smile or how to express his eyes with full of devotion but when actually she spoke all carefully practiced gesture become fruitless. She asks him to go to Araby, a splendid bazaar accordingly Mangan’s sister. The boy quickly decides to go. For the boy Mangan’s sister is splendid and for her Araby bazaar is splendid. So the boy thinks that his quest for beauty will be a success here.

But Araby gives him the recognition of himself as a man whose quest is yet to succeed. On Saturday evening the boy enters the bazaar with the charmed touch of Mangan’s sister by the ‘adults entrance fee’, symbolises the boy’s recognition about himself. ‘A weary looking man’ welcomes him which can be the extention of the bazaar. Two men and the woman conversing.

The woman -” I never said that” . This can be the same word of Mangan’s sister, she has never told him that she loves him.

At this point we see the boy arriving at a point of abyss. But this nothingness is accepted not with easy recognition, but with anger and anguish, he bursts out with tears. This anger suggests to us that the boy’s quest will not end here. He experiences a phoneix like resurrection and with the ashes of the adolescence emerges the adulthood. We can say that through the boy Joyce not only depicts his own life but the story of every man. We have ‘the boy’ in our surroundings who are struggling each and every day to reach to their adulthood through the crossroads of adolescence. This is not the tale of a particular era, this is eternal which comes to us with different shades and colours in different times. This is an Eternal Quest for Beauty.