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Elliott David
English 3450
Dr. Cofelt
11/23/2016
The Timeless Structure of Araby
James Joyces Araby is one of the best known examples of the coming of age genre,
a type of story that, as the name would imply, focuses on the transition from childhood to
adulthood. For example, in Araby, the young protagonist is a school age boy who attempts to
win the affection of a girl by bringing to her a gift from a local market; a simple task that rapidly
becomes a harmless boyhood fantasy to an outright obsession that ends with a crushing epiphany
that undermines the young protagonists outlook on the world, relationships, and everything that
he thought he knew. However, beneath this simplistic plot is belied by a structure that is more
grand than the humble subject of a boy looking for a gift might imply. Araby is a modernist
retelling of the classical quest narrative, one of the oldest plots and narrative structures in
literature.
Araby begins with the description of a bleak and unwelcoming house. It stands apart
from the others, detatched (Joyce), at a blind end. Though blind end is common slang for a
dead end street, scholar Harry Stone points out the careful usage of the term. He says that the
words suggest that blindness plays a role thematically. It suggests, later as we understand, that
the boy is blind, and has reached a dead end in his life. (Stone 382) The house is inundated with

imagery related to death and decay. A dead former tenant, rooms filled with stagnant, musty
(Joyce) air, a rusted bicycle pump lost amidst the tangled, unkempt backyard this is the
narrators world, and it is not a particularly bright one. The narrator seems to be ignorant to the
darkness of his surroundings, displaying childish immaturity in his inability to recognize the
negativity that clings to the house, instead describing it with a sense of wonderment and
curiosity. When he finds moldering, damp books in a drawing room, he claims to favor the copy
of Memoires of Vidoque because its leaves were yellow (Joyce) rather than being repulsed by
the decaying tomes. Instead of wallowing in the misery of the house, the narrator spends his time
as any boy would playing with the other neighborhood children. This beginning section of the
story is what is called the enfance (French for childhood). This, according to Jerome Mandel in
essay The Structure of Araby, defines the heroes youth before his coming of manhood or
knighthood. (Mandel 48)
This comes to an abrupt end with the appearance of one of his friends Mangans
sister. He quickly becomes enamored with her, so much so he claims that Her image
accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. (Joyce) He goes on to say, Her
name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not
understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my
heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. (Joyce) It does not take long for the sister to
cease being a crush and more of an ideal to the boy. He no longer sees her as a person; she is
now a fantasy he has built to unrealistic grandeur in his head, something to project his desires on.
This signals the end of the narrators enfance and the beginning of his journey. As Mandel states,
The enfance ends with the introduction of the heroine: Tristans youth is over when he meets
Isolt, Yvains when he meets Laudine, Cliges when he meets Fenice. As a romance heroine she

must be above the knight in station and she must be taboo. (Mandel 49) This is seen by the fact
that the heroine in question is both older than the narrator and not close to him in any way. It is
said that she has never exchanged more than a few words with him up until the fateful exchange
that leads to the quest. However, he is smitten with her, and these intense, passionate feelings are
the beginning of the end of his youth.
When the narrator and Mangans sister speak, they speak of the bazaar that wishes to
attend. This is the beginning of the quest, in which he pledges himself to her service. When
acknowledged, he declares that he will go to the bazaar. Not only is the protagonist vowing that
he shall quest for the lady, but the lady herself takes an interesting position as both object of
affection and the ultimate prize of the quest. While the protagonist quests for an object worthy of
proving his love for his suitor, it is only a means to an end. His ultimate prize is that of
companionship with Mangnans sister. This is reminiscent of the many tales of knights questing
to rescue a princess or lady from the clutches of some evil force. Though he may quest for her
sake, he is, for all intents and purposes, questing for her as well. This devotion is problematic for
the young hero. His obsession causes trouble in his school work, in which it is said, I had hardly
any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire,
seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play. This represents the hardship of the
knights quest, in which he must suffer the trials of travel, combat, and other such hardships in
the name of his quest. As the protagonist is a child, it is obvious that he cannot indulge in a long,
cumbersome journey on horseback in which he slays giants or monsters with enchanted swords.
Instead, Joyce gives the reader a most relatable scenario in which the protagonists single-minded
fixation on Mangans sister. Though the modern reader may have trouble imagining what it is to

be a questing knight in the medieval period, almost anyone who has ever gone to school can
relate to the anxiety and apprehension that comes with waiting through long hours of instruction
when one would rather be anywhere but class. The battles and swordplay that would test a
questing knight in medieval romance are instead represented by a mundane passage of time a
long, scathing stretch of time of unimportant nothingness for the boy that separates him from his
end goal. Even on the day of the bazaar, ill fortune besets the boy. Joyce writes, I felt the house
in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. (Joyce) The air is described as pitilessly
raw and the narrator feels unease about the events to come as he says, My heart misgave me.
(Joyce) As Mandel points out, this moment of doubt is crucial in the quest narrative. Gawains
heart, he writes of the classic story of Gawain and the Green Knight. Like that of the boy, does
not actually misgive him in the this medieval romance (although it almost does), but in Malory
Gawains heart does misgive him and he questions to validity of a quest to important as that of
the Grail. (Mandel 52) In this moment, the boys faith is tested. As Mandel says, he is doomed
to failure (Mandel 52) as he succumbs to these doubts. Only a very few knights are pure He
writes. And they find the Grail. Other obstacles appear, such as the old woman, Mrs. Mercer,
who he must endure the gossip of, as well as the ravings of his uncle, and a lack of money.
Inevitably, he displays a tenacious patience by outlasting all of them, yet does not work to obtain
any of them. All he achieves is through weathering a storm of misfortune. The talkative Mrs.
Mercer leaves of her own accord, the uncle allows him to go to the bazaar, and his aunt gifts him
a sum of money. It can be said that the boy has done nothing to deserve the prize he seeks at the
end of his quest. He has not worked nor shed anything other than copious amounts of time and
anxiety in the name of his quest, and therefore is not worthy of receiving the blessings of its

completion. As mentioned above, many quested for the Grail, but very few, and only the purest,
of knights were able to claim it.
Ultimately, the narrator does fail his quest, though his failure is twofold. On one hand, the
narrator finds that the illusion of the exotic and foreign was just that an illusion. There is
nothing behind the faade but a dark and empty mall, staffed by aloof and uninterested
employees who care and know nothing for his own personal quest. The line I recognized a
silence like that which pervades a church after a service. (Joyce) gives the scene a sense of
almost religious importance, of which many questing knights faced. Three of the most famous
myths of questing knights, those of Sir Percival, Lancelot, and Gawain, were to find the Holy
Grail, one of the most sacred relics in Christendom. Its also worth noting that the employees of
the bazaar are said to have English accents foreign, yet not too foreign for an Irish setting. This
creates a sense of disappointing mundanity in something that was meant to be exotic and
outlandish, as the name bazaar would imply. In the end, the narrator leaves the bazaar empty
handed, angry with himself, the world, and thoroughly disillusioned with what he thought he
knew about the nature of love. He fails the quest set upon him by Mangans sister, and more
importantly, he demanded of himself. This, Mandel thinks, is important. He writes, But
something of value derives from failure, some painful human truth: we discover, like Gawain,
that we are not as good as we thought ourselves to be. (Mandel 53) This is referring to the story
of Sir Gawain, in which he fails to retrieve the Grail for King Arthur. In doing so, like the
narrator, he realizes his own vanity and shortcomings. So vain was he that he failed to realize
that he was unworthy of the grail from the beginning, stretching all the way back to the
aforementioned doubt that he would ever succeed in quest. This implies that, though the narrator

has failed his quest for Mangans sister, he has gained something much more worthwhile in his
trials: that of an epiphany. This epiphany can be argued to be the end of his youth and the
delusions that come with it. Though painful, this is the necessary transition between boyhood and
adulthood. Mandel even suggests that the entire structure of the story that of the traditional
questing knight narrative is the older, more mature narrator poking fun at his youthful zeal. The
story is indeed told in a past tense, so it stands to reason that the narrator is simply looking back
on past events and recalling them with a healthy dose of distance and self-awareness. Mandel
says that the the romance structure becomes a part of the narrators iconic dramatization of
himself as a figure out of stories about knights and ladies. (Mandel 54) This would mean that
the story is not a tragedy, but rather a sort of ironic comedy, and turns the entire emotional crux
of the tale on its head and demands an entirely different reading.
With this in mind, one can see the many ways in which the structure of Joyces Araby
hinges itself on being a parody or pastiche of the classic tale of a questing knight, on a journey to
win the affections of a lady who is equal parts his lover and the object of his quest. By examining
the structure, the entire meaning and lesson that the story wishes to impart can be dramatically
changed, showing the importance that the narrative structure holds over the story.

Works Cited

Mandel, Jerome. The Structure of Araby. Modern Language Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, 1985, pp.
4854. www.jstor.org/stable/3194648.
Stone, Harry. Araby and the Writings of James Joyce. The Antioch Review, vol. 25, no. 3,
1965, pp. 375410. www.jstor.org/stable/4610703.