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Araby Analysis

Decent Essays

Temptation. Many people confuse this feeling with that of love, yet they are wrong. Love and temptation do not go hand in hand, and are actually two separate feelings all together. James Joyce delves into the question between ‘what is love?’ and ‘what is temptation?’ in Araby, which he shows how a young boy embarks on an archetypal quest to see if he can discover if what he feels is really affection.
The perspective of the main character in the short story is very important to the archetypal quest because it develops the story through his point of view. In the first few paragraphs the author creates the setting. The use of words such as “uninhabited”, “brown”, “imperturbable”, and “sombre” all create a sullen and dark image for the reader. …show more content…

The main character describes the girl as elegant and notices the “soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side”. Her hair here is symbolic of this trap that the boy is being lured into. While this is his first love, his inexperience is causing him to fall for her much more than most would. The comparison of her hair to a rope puts emphasis on this since he is being lured in in a sense and he can’t restrain himself from being baited in. The light that is described as illuminating Mangan’s sister amidst the dark setting also proves to be symbolic of this trap. “The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there, and falling, lit up the hand upon the railing”. All of her body in this section is described here as highlighted by the light and she appears to be flashing to the boy. The light therefore is symbolic of the fact that the main character is being lured in by Mangan’s sister. The whole interaction is described very similarly to a fish being lured in by a fishing lure. He isn’t thinking straight and just sees the light and is immediately intrigued. This attribute of the story makes it an archetypal quest because it is universally applicable to people. Often people fall for someone simply due to appearance, and are drawn in very much like the

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