) "The Abbot"(It is said that Queen Mary of Scotland was depicted as a very devout, serious, religious and romantic person.) shows a boy's confused recognitions among religion, romanticism and sex, while "The Memoirs of Vidocq"(the story of a double life of a police and a thief) suggests an allusion on deception and dishonesty. With the name of Mangan, whose sister is the partner of the boy's one sided love, Joyce suggests a strong allusion of J. C. Mangan(an Irish poet in 19th century), who often wrote stories about Araby and also translated Arabian poems. By the name Mangan, she was symbolized as a person of hypocrisy and misled emotion. Besides, there is the back drawing room, where the boy does masturbations in confused illusions of sexual fantasy and religious mystery and devotion. This implies the fact that the desires of the boy, who is a Dublin Irish Catholic, was completely hidden by the religious suppression. .
Next, I would like to point out the sentence that reads, "My eyes burned with anguish and anger." In the opening part of the novel, the writer used the expression, "being blind". (Some scholars explain that the expression, "being blind" means an impasse indicating the deadlock situation of the Irish society.) I think it shows how the boy's emotions change to anguish and anger when he faces the reality, coming out of the walls of traditions and religion. The boy's emotions had been vague and abstractive up to this point but from there he becomes a real and concrete person.
At the last scene, the boy realizes that his journey to Araby is not for a holy duty(The girl, his one sided lover, asked him an errand to buy something for her, and he regarded her as a holy subsistence.) but only for his imprudence and vanity. The society made him open his eyes to reality(What helped him open his eyes were a few shabbily left-over coins and the English girl who was mindlessly fooling herself by playing around with boys.
