Planned so Perfectly - Close reading of the disillusionment of the narrator

The narrator's expectation of Araby

After his obsession with Araby, as the narrator arrives at the bazaar, he becomes disillusioned and realizes that he has been mocked by his pride and insignificance. The boy associates the bazaar with the East and with dreams of excitement, decadence, luxury, sensuality, and brightness, which provide an escape from the dark and dreary North Richmond Street in which he has been trapped for his whole life. Having idealized the bazaar to an almost sacred degree, the main character is inevitably let down when he faces the dark, quiet, hall that he imagined would be bursting with color and roaring with excitement.

The main character shows his disenchantment when he sees that most of the stalls have already closed as he says, “I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service” (24). With the bazaar closing, surrounded by darkness and silence, the boy sees the opposite of what he hoped to see. The setting reminds of him of “a church after a service,” a sight that is not exotic or exciting, but one that is eerie and depressing, and too reminding of the character’s monotonous life. This church setting echoes back to the previous story, “The Sisters,” in which the boy was scarred psychologically by the mysterious Father Flynn.  

The main character is further disappointed with his experience at Araby when he observes three shopkeepers: “ I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation. ‘O, I never said such a thing!’ ‘O, but you did!’ ‘O, but I didn’t!’ ‘Didn’t she say that?’ ‘Yes. I heard her.’ ‘O, there’s a . . . fib!’” (24). The English accents of the merchants reveal to the boy that this bazaar is completely unrelated to the exotic East he dreamed of, but is rather financed by the English, the enemy of the Irish. Furthermore, the trivial conversation he overhears undermines his seriousness and belittles his mission. The flirtatious and suggestive conversation disparages his sacred and serious love.

The boy realizes how obsessed he was and how unimportant his mission is when he says, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (24). Through his epiphany, the boy notices that his vanity of impressing Mangan’s sister pushed him and now it mocks him, as he is still a child who has failed his mission. The boy realizes that he has been fooled by his own pride, as his “eyes [burn] with anguish and anger.” Realizing that Araby was in fact the opposite of what he expected, the main character has to return to the monotony of life on blind, stagnant North Richmond Street.