Kat McAdaragh

There’s a moment in every young person’s life when the world reveals itself to be smaller, shabbier, and more disappointing than they ever imagined. James Joyce captures this universal experience with devastating precision in Araby, a short story that reads like a love letter to lost innocence—written in the bitter handwriting of experience.

The story follows an unnamed boy who becomes infatuated with his friend’s sister, a girl who exists more as an ideal than a person. When she mentions wanting to visit the Araby bazaar, the boy seizes upon this as his mission to prove his devotion—he’ll go to the bazaar and bring her back something absolutely wonderful. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

When Fantasy Meets Dublin’s Reality

Joyce understood that the cruelest awakenings are not the dramatic—it’s the mundane. The boy’s romantic quest doesn’t end with a sword fight or a dramatic rejection. It dies a death of a thousand small disappointments. Adults who forget their promises, delayed trains, and a bazaar that turns out to be nothing but a collection of cheap stalls closing up for the night.

The word “Araby” becomes a character in the story, pulsing with exotic promises. Joyce writes that “the syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me.” The language here is almost religious in its intensity. This is a boy who has transformed a simple bazaar into a sacred pilgrimage.

But Dublin in Joyce’s time wasn’t a place that nurtured grand romantic gestures. It was a city caught between tradition and modernity, between Catholic devotion and secular desire, between dreams of escape and the reality of paralysis. The boy’s journey to Araby becomes a part of the larger Irish condition—a gap between aspiration and possibility.

The Sacred and The Sexual

Perhaps the most psychologically complex aspect of Araby is how Joyce weaves together the boy’s religious upbringing with his awakening sexuality. The narrator doesn’t just admire Mangan’s sister, he worships her, describing how he “bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.” This isn’t teenage hyperbole; its the language of someone who literally cannot separate the sacred from the sexual.

Living in a house previously owned by a priest, surrounded by religious texts, the boy has been taught that desire itself might be sinful. So he combined his feelings with spiritual imagery, seeing the girl as a “divine creature” bathed in holy light. This psychological split creates an internal tension that makes his eventual disillusionment even more devastating.

Joyce understood that for young people raised in restrictive religious environments, the first stirrings of romantic feeling can feel simultaneously transcendent or forbidden. The boy’s confusion isn’t just about love, it’s about learning to navigate desire in a world that has taught him such feelings are dangerous.

The Language of Disappointment

What makes Araby so enduring is Joyce’s ability to make the ordinary feel mythic, then he strips that mythology away to reveal the ordinary again. His imagery shifts through the story, moving from the “brown houses” and “dark dripping garden” of the boy’s everyday reality to the imagined “silver and gold” and “jewels” of the bazaar, before returning to the harsh fluorescent reality of the actual event.

This isn’t just a clever literary technique—it’s an accurate representation of how disappointment actually works. We build up our expectations, getting our hopes up, with language and imagery that transform the mundane into something magical. Then reality hits hard, and we’re left holding the pieces of our shattered illusions.

Growing Up in Public

Araby belongs to Joyce’s collection Dubliners, a book dedicated to capturing what he called the “paralysis” of Irish society. But the boy’s story isn’t really about Dublin, it’s about the universal experience of realizing that the adult world is not organized around your romantic feelings or personal quests.

The boy’s epiphany at the end of the story—when he sees himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”—marks the moment when childhood officially ends. Not because he’s suffered some terrible trauma, but because he learned that his inner world of romantic fantasy doesn’t correspond to external reality. This is perhaps the most common form of heartbreak—not the loss of love, but the loss of the belief that love can transform the world.

Joyce’s genius lies in making us feel the full weight of this ordinary tragedy. We’ve all been that boy, standing in some metaphorical bazaar, realizing that the thing we wanted most was never really there at all. What makes Araby devastating isn’t its uniqueness, it’s the universality of it.

In just a few pages, Joyce manages to capture something essential about the human condition—our infinite capacity for self-deception, the terrible clarity that comes when that deception finally falls away. It’s a story about growing up, but more than that, it’s about those specific moments when we realize we’ve grown up—and there’s no going back.