James Joyce s Araby And The Dead - 1176 Words

James Joyce’s short stories â€Å"Araby† and â€Å"The Dead† both depict self-discovery as being defined by moments of epiphany. Both portray characters who experience similar emotions and who, at the ends of the stories, confront similarly harsh realities of self-discovery. In each of these stories, Joyce builds up to the moment of epiphany through a careful structure of events and emotions that leads both protagonists to a redefining moment of self-discovery. The main characters in both these stories are young adults who call Dublin, Ireland, home. Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of â€Å"The Dead,† seems to be at the upper end of the middle class, while the nameless boy in â€Å"Araby† is at the lower end. We get an idea of each character’s social status in the opening passages of the stories. The boy in â€Å"Araby† lives on a street where all the houses, â€Å"conscious of the decent lives within them,† have the same â€Å"brown imperturbable faces† (182)—a description which conveys a dull, less fortunate scene. The opening paragraphs of â€Å"The Dead† portray a different, more cosmopolitan kind of scene. The setting is an evening party, whose hostesses live a â€Å"modest† life, yet keep a servant and believe in eating â€Å"the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout† (198). Despite their differences in social status, Gabriel and the boy are similar in their emotional makeup. The narrator of â€Å"Araby† is a sensitive boy whose romantic notions are easily aroused andShow MoreRelatedComparative Analysis Of Epiphany, From James Joyce s Araby And The Dead1758 Words   |  8 PagesAnalysis of Epiphany, from James Joyce’s â€Å"Araby† and â€Å"The Dead† James Joyce elaborately portrays the complexity of the human male psyche through his protagonists in â€Å"Araby† and â€Å"The Dead.† Through the use of first person perspective, each protagonists’ true motivations and perceptions of reality are betrayed by Joyce, therefore allowing the reader to fully understand the fallacies and complexities within each character. Through the depictions of such complexities, Joyce is able to leverage the subtleRead MoreJames Joyce’s Dubliners Essay1493 Words   |  6 PagesJames Joyce’s Dubliners is a collection of short stories that aims to portray middle class life in Dublin, Ireland in the early twentieth century. Most of the stories are written with themes such as entrapment, paralysis, and epiphany, which are central to the flow of the collection of stories as a whole. Characters are usually limited financially, socially, and/or by their environment; they realize near the end of each story that they cannot escape their unfortunate situation in Dublin. These storiesRead MoreA Look At The Themes Of Home1742 Words   |  7 PagesHome In James Joyce’s Dubliners In Dubliners, James Joyce explores the objective view of the paralysis that is a city. He believed strongly that Irish society had been paralyzed by two forces, both which he encountered throughout his life. One being England, and all of its social bewilderment, and the other being the Roman Catholic Church. As a result of this torpor the Irish experienced a downfall, economically and socially, and became the poorest country in Western-Europe. But for Joyce IrelandRead MoreEssay On Love DoesnT Always Conquer All1593 Words   |  7 PagesLois Berger Love Doesn’t Always Conquer All You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Maybe the narrator in James Joyce’s â€Å"Araby† doesn’t become a villain, but his dreams of being a hero die on the day he realizes he is powerless to get the girl he loves. This is a classic case of how romanticism negatively affects people, especially young men. There’s nothing wrong with romance in and of itself; many people read books and watch movies involving a hero and a damselRead MoreEssay on James Joyce1722 Words   |  7 Pages James Joyce nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;James Joyce, an Irish novelist and poet, grew up near Dublin. James Joyce is one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. In each of his prose works he used symbols to experience what he called an quot;epiphanyquot;, the revelation of certain revealing qualities about himself. His early writings reveal individual moods and characters and the plight of Ireland and the Irish artist in the 1900s. Later works, reveal a man in all hisRead MoreAnalysis Of The Nameless Boy 3175 Words   |  13 PagesS.S.S #1 (Araby) There is a force so powerful that it can control lives, this force is love. In the short story Araby, the nameless boy has fallen in love for an unnamed girl, who is Mangan’s sister, after moving to Dublin, Ireland. Each morning the boy will watch her through the front window in the parlour and quickly grab his books to walk behind her ,through their dull village, all the way to the point at which their paths diverge. Araby is about a young boy whom is not named who moves intoRead MoreThe Search for Truth or Meaning in James Joyces Dubliners1788 Words   |  8 PagesThe Search for Truth or Meaning in Dubliners       Several of James Joyces stories in Dubliners can read as lamentations on a frustrating inability of man to represent meaning by external means, including written word. When characters in Araby, Counterparts, and A Painful Case attempt to represent or signify themselves, other characters, or abstract spiritual entities with or through words, they not only fail, but end up emotionally ruined. Moreover, the inconclusive endings of the threeRead MoreThroughout The Beginning Of The Course We Have Read A Wide1487 Words   |  6 Pagestheme in the majority of the works we have read. Many of these stories are about a character or characters journey and what this reveals to them about themselves or the world around them. In particular Young Goodman Brown, Araby and A Good Man Is Hard to Find all deal a character s realization of the bitter world they live in. The journey is merely a prompt or tool that helps to unearth the misery that each character finds. I will be comparing and contra sting the characters journeys in the three storiesRead MoreAnalysis Of John Updike s Araby 1967 Words   |  8 PagesJohn Updike s penchant for appropriating great works of literature and giving them contemporary restatement in his own fiction is abundantly documented--as is the fact that, among his favorite sources, James Joyce looms large.[1] With special affinity for Dubliners, Updike has, by common acknowledgment, written at least one short story that strongly resembles the acclaimed Araby, not only in plot and theme, but in incidental detail. That story, the 1960 You ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I LoveRead MoreAnalysis of The Novel Dubliners by James Joyce Essay1605 Words   |  7 Pages In response to his publishers suggested revisions to Dubliners, James Joyce elevated his rhetoric to the nearly Evangelical [and wrote]: I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look in my nicely polished looking-glass1. A pivotal part of this looking-glass is Joyces representation of Dublin, which functions akin to an external unconsciousness in that a series of unrelated characters experience similar