From Innocence to Knowledge: James Joyce's "Araby"
FROM INNOCENCE TO KNOWLEDGE: CHARACTER IN JAMES JOYCE'S "ARABY"
In his brief but complex story, "Araby," James Joyce concen-trates on character rather than on plot to reveal the ironies inherentin self-deception. On one level "Araby" is a story of initiation, of aboy's quest for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in aninner awareness and a first step into manhood. On another level thestory consists of a grown man's remembered experience, for the storyis told in retrospect by a man who looks back to a particular momentof intense meaning and insight. As such, the boy's experience is notrestricted to youth's encounter with first love. Rather, it is a portrayalof a continuing problem all through life: the incompatibility of theideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, with the bleakness of real-ity. This double focus-the boy who first experiences, and the manwho has not forgotten-provides for the dramatic rendering of astory of first love told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision,can employ the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery nec-essary to reveal the story's meaning.
The boy's character is indirectly suggested in the opening scenesof the story. He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city. Sym-bolic images show him to be an individual who is sensitive to the factthat his city's vitality has ebbed and left a residue of empty piety, thefaintest echoes of romance, and only symbolic memories of an activeconcern for God and fellow men. Although the young boy cannot ap-prehend it intellectually, he feels that the street, the town, and Irelanditself have become ingrown, self-satisfied, and unimaginative. It is a
world of spiritual stagnation, and as a result, the boy's outlook is se-verely limited. He is ignorant and therefore innocent. Lonely, imagin-ative, and isolated, he lacks the understanding necessary for evalua-tion and perspective. He is at first as blind as his world, but Joyceprepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by tempering hisblindness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his world.
The boy's manner of thought is also made clear in the openingscenes. Religion controls the lives of the inhabitants of North Richmond Street, but it is a dying religion and receives only lip service.The boy, however, entering the new experience of first love, finds hisvocabulary within the experiences of his religious training and the ro-mantic novels he has read. The result is an idealistic and confused in-terpretation...