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Being Covered from the Truth in Araby by James Joyce Essay

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Being Covered from the Truth in Araby by James Joyce

“Araby” by James Joyce, is a short story about a young boy trying to find and his search for inner happiness. The main setting takes place in the boy’s neighborhood where he lives with his aunt and uncle. The sub setting takes place in an Araby or English bazaar, a carnival if you will. In the neighborhood we find that there is; an uninhabited house that has not been occupied for some time, a girl, who’s referred to as ‘Mangan’s sister’, whom the boy has a lustful crush on, and a story of a deceased priest. In the Araby we find a lot of empty booths, along with some hollow characters. The neighborhood, the Araby, the boy, and other characters in the story have an overall theme …show more content…

They would play until fear came upon them of being seen by an adult or passerby. Then they would stop, and keep themselves hid from the ‘truth of sight’, or someone seeing them, in the shadows. “If my uncle was seen tuning the corner we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea we watched her from our shadow…” (para. 3).

The boy also hid his inner self from the truth, like the house, because of his own lust for Mangan’s sister. He, being a boy, did not understand what love was, yet pursued it trying to gain inner happiness. “Each morning” he would lie “on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped” (para. 4). He lusts after her thinking that is was pure love.

Later in a conversation between the two they talked about going to the Araby and the boy told her that if he went he would bring her something. Thinking that he could buy the love of the young flower, he did not understand that the pure love, to which he clamed to have, could not be bought. Yet, because of his lust which covered his reason, he went though an extreme amount of stress, getting money from his uncle and finding a way to get to the bazaar, to be able to buy her a toy. So in search for his inner happiness he found only stress and

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