The story portrays the loss of innocence and the frustration of first love. The boy’s extravagant expectations of rewards he hopes to gain from his commitment to the girl of his affection are ruthlessly disappointed. The narrator unravels the disappointing circumstances from his trip as a symbol of the emptiness of the ideals from the journey he undertook. Accordingly, the boy relates the senseless conversation between himself and Mangan’s sister and realizes that he perceived the trivial reality behind the romantic image he fantasized. Nevertheless, his perception is unreliable because of his immaturity. The story of Araby, then, demonstrations that the temptations to both the romantic desire and to the pessimistic melancholy of experience
