After all, there must be a world beyond North Richmond Street. .
The former tenant of the boy's house was a priest. The boy describes the rooms in the house, as well as the room the priest died in, saying, "Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers"(Vesterman 8). This gloominess represents what Joyce probably would have felt like if he had remained on North Richmond all his life. Joyce describes the boys playing in the street, which is symbolic of the children's lack to conform to the spiritual confines of the church, unlike the adults who are trapped on North Richmond. This point is conveyed further by the aunt and uncle's lack of enthusiasm concerning the boys" trip to Araby. .
There seems to be an eerie shadow cast on the boy's trials and tribulations throughout the story by his lack of clarity concerning the grand scheme of life. Joyce often describes many things in the boy's life as being dark. He has the boy say that, "The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes," and he introduces a landscape of "dark odorous stables" and "the .
dark dripping gardens"(Vesterman 7). These murky descriptions convey how dark the boy's world seems, and that he is seeking out some sort of light. The first search for light materializes in the boy's description of the "central apple tree" in the gardens behind his home. The apple tree in the garden could be interpreted to serve as Eden's garden and the bareness of the back yard garden seems to reflect the bareness in his own Garden of Eden. .
The next example of downfalls the boy associates with religion are the possessions left by the priest. A few yellowed books, donations to institutions, furniture, and a rusty bicycle pump, represent all that the priest left on earth with one special exception: no evidence of a spiritual legacy remains.