The Theme Of Escape In James Joyce's Dubliners

Introduction
Imaginative escape is creation of images in the head, like remembering how your young life was. Visualization of the past happenings is eminent in these stories. Imagination is much eminent in the story of Araby. The narrator is filled with thoughts of his friend’s sister though the girl knows little about it as the narrator doesn’t talk much with the girl, he fears expressing his secret love to her. Physical escape is simply to put what you have imagined into action. It is experiencing the escape in reality. Escapades of physical escape reveal itself in the stories, An Encounter and Eveline. The characters are trying to run away from their daily routine activities. The school boys play truant to run away from the school daily …show more content…
It starts with the school boys imagining to be playing games from the Wild West, mimicking the cowboys and the Indian battles. The boys also imagine fictional stories during their leisure time. It is from this imagination that they come with a well thought out plan to escape from school. The narrator says “….when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance, I began to hunger again for wild sensations…. “(James, …show more content…
We see the narrator putting his thoughts into actions in the story. The narrator who is a boy is fully occupied by the thoughts of his friend’s sister, whom he has clandestinely fallen in love with. The narrator is infatuation towards the girl is very high he says, her image accompanied him even in places the most hostile to romance (James, 20). He places himself in front of his house room in order to see the girl leave her house. When he sees her, he physically springs out of the house running towards her, trailing her from behind. When he reaches her they do not talk much as the narrator fears to express his feelings to her. We see the girl thinking about Mangan’s sister while on his to the market with his aunt. His thinks about her while sitting in his house alone. The narrator gets the chance to prove his love for her when he promises to buy her a worthy gift from an Araby bazaar. The boy promised to go and said to bring something for her,” …..I will go ….I will bring you something” (James. 21). He anticipates the bazaar with eager and restlessness and he finds classes boring and obstructing him from thinking about Mangan,s sister. On the day of bazaar the narrator’s uncle promises to come back home early but only gets home at 10 PM at night. It’s physical when the narrator waits impatiently for his uncle and soon he enters the boy rushes out and boards a train to the bazaar which is very slow and