James Joyces Araby - Loss of Innocence in Araby Essays -- Joyce Dubli

Loss of sinlessness in Araby      In her story, Araby, James Joyce concentrates on character rather than on plot to fall in the ironies inherent in self-deception. On one take Araby is a story of initiation, of a sons pick up for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in an inner awareness and a starting line step into opushood. On an other level the story consists of a grown opuss remembered experience, for the story is told in retrospect by a man who looks back to a particular moment of intense meaning and insight. As such, the boys experience is not restricted to youths encounter with runner love. Rather, it is a depiction of a continuing problem all through life the revulsion of the ideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, with the bleakness of reality. This double focus-the boy who first experiences, and the man who has not forgotten-provides for the dramatic rendering of a story of first love told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision, can affiance the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery necessary to reveal the storys meaning. The boys character is indirectly suggested in the opening scenes of the story. He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city. Symbolic images show him to be an individu... ...ossibility. That sense of loss is intensified, for its dimension grows as we realize that the desire to, live on the dream will continue through adulthood. At no other point in the story is characterization as brilliant as at the end. Joyce draws his protagonist with strokes designed to let us recognize in the creature driven and derided by vanity both a boy who is initiated into knowledge through a loss of innocence and a man who fully realizes the incompatibility between the beautiful and innocent world of the vision and the very real world of fact. In Araby, Joyce uses character to embody the root of his story.