The main character in the short story “Araby” by James Joyce is a young boy that looks through life with self-deceptive eyes. He thinks he is in love with a girl, but in reality all he has are his romantic thoughts and an unrealistic idolization. It is a story about self-deception – a young boy’s realization that he has misled himself into thinking his love was pure and real, when in fact it was the opposite. Towards the end of his quest at Araby, he discovers the difference between his dream world and actuality, sending him a crushing blow of reality. The primary focus of the story revolves around a young boy who deciphers the difference between cruel reality and the fantasies of romance that play in his head.
A good part of the story deals with the boy’s infatuation with Mangan’s sister. He has this great love for the girl, and yet he says he has never talked to her: “I had never spoken to her, except a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood” (Joyce 477). The boy is extraordinary lovesick for a girl he knows so little about. He sums up his feelings for her perfectly when he says, “But my body
The boy has withdrawn from reality and is under a spell of infatuation that says no mind to anything but his fixation on the girl. “I have chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read” (Joyce 478).
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