ARABY - James Joyce Dubliners - Collection of Short Stories Published in 1914

Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce focuses on children and adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students, shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen. Joyce envisioned his collection as a looking glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories, Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen a boy visits a bazaar, a woman buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks. Though these events may not appear profo und, the characters intensely personal and often tragic revelations certainly are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of Dublin. A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another story, and stories often have settings that appear in other stories. Such subtle connections create a sense of shared experience and evoke a map of Dublin life that Joyce would return to again and again in his later works.

MOTIFS in Dubliners 1) PARALYSIS In most of the stories in Dubliners, a character has a desire, faces obstacles to it, then ultimately relents and suddenly stops all action. These moments of paralysis show the characters inability to change their lives and reverse the routines that hamper their wishes. Such immobility fixes the Dubliners in cycles of experience. A) Show the motif of Paralysis in Araby.

2) EPIPHANY Characters in Dubliners experience both great and small revelations in their everyday lives, moments that Joyce himself referred to as epiphanies, a word with connotations of religious revelation. These epiphanies do not bring new experiences and the possibility of reform, as one might expect such moments to. Rather, these epiphanies allow characters to better understand their particular circumstances, usually rife with sadness and routine, which they then return to with resignation and frustration. A) What is the boys epiphany? How does he feel? What does he learn from it? Protagonist 1) What is the main conflict of the protagonist? 2) In the first line it says the North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street. Can we say that the boys was blind too? Why? 3) Pg. 30, 31, 32 - How is Mangans sister described by the boy? Does he make an idealized vision of her? What does his position on the floor signify? Likewise, explain his imagination of himself through a throng of foes.

Themes

General Themes in Dubliners: 1) Some themes are recurrent in Dubliners: a) The prison of routine; b) The Desire for Escape; and, c) The Intersection of Life and Death. Can you see these genera themes in Araby? Explain. Specific Themes in Araby: 2) Explain the following themes in Araby: a) Alienation and Loneliness(in relation to his friends and Mangans sister); b) Change and Transformation(if any growth happens, is he content with it? Is it a passage?); and, c) God and Religion(How is the transcendent related to reality in the boys m ind? What are the similarities with the Holy Grail quest?).

SYMBOLS While the boy is at Araby, the various, and often contrasting, meanings of these

symbols converge to produce his epiphany.

1) Explain the following symbols evidenced in the story: - The former tenant of the narrator's house, the Catholic priest and his books: - The bazaar, Araby: - Mrs. Mercer, the pawnbroker's widow: - Mangan's sister:

ACTION Describe the dialogue the narrator listens to when he finally arrives in the Bazaar. Howis that related to the epiphany he has?