Araby

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1914

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Symbols & Motifs

Araby’s Bazaar

Araby’s Bazaar is a Dublin market organized by a religious organization as a way to raise money. The market is famous for selling objects from Asia, and these objects are particularly interesting to Mangan’s sister, who regrets that she will not be able to attend the market. The name of the market hints at the intrigue that Araby’s Bazaar poses to a young girl who likely has never left her home country. The items sold at the bazaar represent the world beyond Ireland; they symbolize the broader world which is only accessibly to the children of Dublin through the cheap trinkets sold from a market stall. Like the narrator’s conception of romance, Mangan’s sister’s conception of foreign cultures is limited. She is intrigued by the rest of the world, just as the narrator is intrigued by love. She can only conceive of foreign lands through a distinctly limited framework, however, just as the narrator can only express his love through a religious framework. The bazaar becomes a symbol of the desire to learn more while simultaneously representing the limited worldviews of the children in the story.

The bazaar is also an important symbol of the desires of Mangan’s sister. The bazaar is important because it is not something that the narrator wants or even thinks about. Instead, it illustrates the importance that the narrator is placing on the girl’s opinion and his desire to please her. Because the narrator believes he is so in love with Mangan’s sister and because she has expressed a desire to attend the market, the market suddenly becomes the most important thing in the narrator’s life. The elevated importance of Araby’s Bazaar in the narrator’s thoughts symbolizes the extent to which he takes on her desires as his own, and it illustrates his desperate desire to please her. He has no idea how love works, so he chooses to believe that going to a market and purchasing a trinket for a girl is the highest expression of romance possible.

Once he reaches Araby’s Bazaar, however, the narrator realizes that he has been mistaken. The presence of adults in the soon-to-close market only serves to demonstrate to the narrator that he has been entirely vain in his opinions about love. His love is an irrelevance, as important as the trinkets sold on the market tables. Ultimately, the boy’s desire to go to the market and his sudden understanding of the truth about the market symbolize his growing understanding of love.

Impaired Vision

From the opening line of the story, impaired vision is a recurring motif. The street where the narrator lives is described as “being blind” (249) because it is a dead end road. Impaired vision is used to represent forms of limitation. The dead end street may seem like the world to the young children who play on the road until their skin is glowing red, but it is a limited place, a self-contained community that can only hint at the wider city (and world) beyond. Even within the limited street, the narrator lives in an isolated and alone house. He describes his living situation as “blind” because his limited house is on a limited street.

Later in the story, the narrator’s vision becomes even more opaque. He withdraws into the house and can only watch through the window as the other children play while he thinks about his love for Mangan’s sister. Observation and the obscured vision of the narrator are used to represent his sense of feeling limited: He loves Mangan’s sister, he says, but he has no means with which to realize this love. To him, love is a limited force, and Mangan’s sister is clueless to his true feelings.

Impaired vision is also expressed in a narrative sense. The narrator names very few of the characters, and the characters that are named—Mangan and an elderly neighbor named Mrs. Mercer—are inconsequential to the story. The narration of “Araby” deliberately limits the audience’s view of the characters. The audience is denied knowledge of the narrator’s name, as well as the names of Mangan’s sister and the narrator’s aunt and uncle. Even the elderly priest is only referenced through a description of his character. In this sense, the identity of the characters is obscured. The narrator imposes an anonymity on the characters (as well as himself), which speaks to the lingering feelings of shame and embarrassment he feels throughout the text. The narrator is still not comfortable with the audience knowing the truth about his identity, though he will share with them his most embarrassing and anguished moment. He limits the audience’s vision of his true identity, but, at the same time, doing so gives him the freedom to describe his most painful emotions under the guise of anonymity.

The Street

The narrator describes the street on which he lives as his opening line in the story. From this moment on, North Richmond Street has an elevated importance in “Araby.” The street is a symbol of the small, self-contained community. Though the local boys come from different houses and different families, the street connects them. In the winter, they all play on the street together until they are united by the glowing red skin that they develop in the cold. They defiantly form a congress in the street, which is immune to the seasons and to the material realities of their lives. They may come from different backgrounds—characters such as the narrator may have lost his parents, for example—but they are united by the physical symbol of the street. The street is a symbol of unity across divides.

As the story progresses, however, this unity begins to disintegrate. The narrator begins to feel alienated from his friends because he cannot explain to them the love he feels for Mangan’s sister. The complexity and the naivety of his emotion forces him to create a physical distance between himself and his friends. He no longer feels united with them, so he no longer wants to be on the street. Instead, he locks himself away in his house and separates himself from his peers. This physical separation reinforces the street as a metaphor of unity. The friends who remain unified continue to occupy the symbolic street while the alienated narrator is separate and alone.

Eventually, the narrator hatches a plan to endear himself to Mangan’s sister. He plans to leave North Richmond Street and go to Araby’s Bazaar. When he separated himself from his friends, he only withdrew into his house. He may not have physically been on the street itself, but he was very much within the vicinity. His trip to the bazaar demands that he completely leave North Richmond Street and travel across the city. The further he goes from the street, the more he sees of the world. His experience at the bazaar makes him realize that he has acted in a vain and naïve manner. Only once he was removed from the street was he able to view himself objectively. The street is a community, but it also acts as a symbolic bubble, creating a small world inside itself. Only by exiting the street and exiting this symbolic bubble is the narrator able to see the truth behind his behavior.