Araby 5 sentence paragraph: revised

           From a distance, James Joyce's "Araby" might appear as a simple, typical Bildungsroman in which the narrator spiritually matures. After all, when the nameless narrator arrives at Araby, he goes through significant emotional change; he loses a significant part of his previous excitement and feels vanity toward his love for Mangan's sister. Instead, he feels anger at his incompetence to buy anything and at the society that made him so. On a superficial level, "Araby" seems to focus on the maturation of the young and naive narrator, who suddenly tastes bitter reality. However, on the other hand, "Araby" contains more than enough details to be much more than only a story of a maturing child. James Joyce not only elaborated on the inner feelings and love of the narrator, but also devoted much of the story to the description of Dublin and Araby, the two places which symbolize the dull, insipid reality of Ireland at the time. The actual appearances of the places show sharp contrast with the shining images of Mangan's sister and the fantasized Araby that the narrator had romantically formed in his mind before arriving. Contrary to the North Richmond Street being "blind" with houses of "brown imperturbable faces," Mangan's sister was "defined by the light" in the narrator's eyes. The exotic image the narrator formed of the bazaar was shattered as he saw the stalls that were "closed" and "in darkness". The story focuses more on the settings than the characters, whose names were infrequently revealed. Therefore, it is perhaps more accurate to assume that "Araby" is an extended metaphor dealing with the discrepancy between the reality and the ideal, which people frequently encounter in their lives. In this sense, the "anonymous" narrator is a representative of a young child entering the adult world where one's hope, love, and expectations for something new become vain in front of the grey reality.