The story begins with a depressing description of the North Richmond Street. It is a ‘blind’ and ‘quiet’ street where the houses "gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces" and seem "conscious of the decent lives within them". In this description, Joyce links decency and a stifled life together. The street indicates decaying conformity and false piety. The street’s grim silence breaks only after school hours of the Christian Brothers’ School. The boy lives in a deserted house of two stories filled with "cold empty gloomy rooms" formerly inhabited by a priest. The back room of the boy’s house where the priest died is also uninhabited and empty, except for some rubbish left by the dead priest and "air, musty from having been long enclosed”.
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When the boys in “Araby” are ‘set free’ from the Christian Brothers' School, they are released into an environment where even play affords little pleasure: "The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed”. The boys used to play in the dark muddy lanes behind the houses and also in the dark gardens with ash pits and stables scattered here and …show more content…
There is no open space, no sky and no light. The use of irony and symbolic images in the description of the setting indicates that/ shows the boy to be sensitive to moral decay/ spiritual stagnation /the lack of spiritual beauty in his surroundings. Sadly enough, there are no ideals are about both sacred and earthly love; no place of romance in the society. There is only preservation of empty ceremonies, false piety, decaying / mechanical conformity to rules, poverty, both physical and intellectual. This atmosphere of gloom and dullness seems to stifle/ smother the boy as it were. In the midst of these dreary and discouraging surroundings/ circumstances, the boy craves for ideal beauty, romance and love and it is Mangan’s sister who becomes an image to him of all that he seeks, of course not being aware of it. He feels that he has found one image of holiness in his world of lost spirituality and she is a romance incarnate at the same time. The boy feels a surge of hope that now in her love he will find light- physical, intellectual and
When the boys in “Araby” are ‘set free’ from the Christian Brothers' School, they are released into an environment where even play affords little pleasure: "The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed”. The boys used to play in the dark muddy lanes behind the houses and also in the dark gardens with ash pits and stables scattered here and …show more content…
There is no open space, no sky and no light. The use of irony and symbolic images in the description of the setting indicates that/ shows the boy to be sensitive to moral decay/ spiritual stagnation /the lack of spiritual beauty in his surroundings. Sadly enough, there are no ideals are about both sacred and earthly love; no place of romance in the society. There is only preservation of empty ceremonies, false piety, decaying / mechanical conformity to rules, poverty, both physical and intellectual. This atmosphere of gloom and dullness seems to stifle/ smother the boy as it were. In the midst of these dreary and discouraging surroundings/ circumstances, the boy craves for ideal beauty, romance and love and it is Mangan’s sister who becomes an image to him of all that he seeks, of course not being aware of it. He feels that he has found one image of holiness in his world of lost spirituality and she is a romance incarnate at the same time. The boy feels a surge of hope that now in her love he will find light- physical, intellectual and