Similarities Between The Sisters And Araby

“The Sisters” and “Araby” strongly differentiate their narrators when it comes to the inner stream of consciousness and psyche. Joyce’s approach to giving color to the inner sides of his characters is remarkable, with the modernistic style embracing elements of older, more classical spots in his writings. When it comes to these two works in particular, the way the reader is absorbed by the world the author intended to create differs from one text to the other. The shallow psychoanalytical perspective taken into consideration by Joyce in “The Sisters” contrasts the more well-established and accentuated one in “Araby”. Not only does this affect the unfolding of the stories, but also the creation of the narrators themselves, the apprentice of …show more content…
In this case, the approach to individual consciousness is reflected upon the readers themselves; they will eventually start to realize that Joyce’s plan of creating psychology-influenced texts encompasses the direct shift from perceiving events as the main staging point for a story, to reflecting upon the ideologies that pass through and surpass, in this case, a child’s mind, in different aspects. Deborah Parsons states in her book, “Theorists of the modernist novel”, that, contrary to the popular belief that the psychological and psychoanalytical works of Sigmund Freud influenced the modernist approach to individual consciousness, it is not the Austrian psychologist who left this mark on literature, all being as it is due to Henri Bergson: “In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, the celebrity …show more content…
This narrative technique allows for no alleviation of the narrators’ personal distress and dilemmas, isolating themselves from the rest of the rest. This all refers to a type of autism imposed by the author on his narrators: it is only them, in their own world, alone with themselves and their thoughts, which their very own minds created in response to the outside world and to the stimuli not directly perceived by the reader, but later on contacted as percepts by the same reader’s mind as a transposition of the narrators’ consciousness upon their own. One last comparison between the two texts shows two different narrators, contemplating in their soliloquies the nature of the events unfolding around them. One is preoccupied with the death of his mentor, but without mourning nor celebrating his end, which all results in the narrator being trapped inside an inner “consciousness prison”. He cannot facilitate his thoughts and help himself mourn, becoming a paralytic of the inner plane. The other narrator conceived by Joyce is a boy whose age doesn’t allow him to experience the likes of adulthood but whose freedom