Mangan's Sister

(For this post, I chose two excerpts from the story “Araby” – one from the beginning and the other from the ending. The quotes are meant to show the evolution of the narrator’s emotions surrounding his love interest, which start out hopefully and eventually progress to defeat).  

James Joyce’s “Araby” is a story of a young boy’s quest to earn the attention of his love interest. The narrator starts the story describing his obsessive infatuation with his friend Mangan’s sister, depicting his interest in the girl with clichéd adolescent naïveté:

“Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance (…) I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires…”

Although uncertain of whether or not he will ever get a chance with her, his words are hopeful and promising. After having his first actual conversation with her one day, he embarks on a quest to get her what she asks of him from the bazaar and, ultimately, earn her attention. The entire day, he is restless and unable to focus on anything, desperate to get to the bazaar to fulfill his duty. So up until this point, the tone is eager and uplifting and there is a buildup of anticipation leading up to his trip to the bazaar. So far, it comes across to the reader as a conventional love story, and you feel almost certain that there will be a happy ending for the narrator when he buys the girl what she wants.

Unfortunately, following a series of untimely events, the narrator ends up arriving to the bazaar very late, just as the shops are closing down for the evening. He finds one open stall, but ends up buying nothing when he feels unwelcome by the saleswoman behind the booth. After such a nervewracking buildup of expectancy, his departing from the darkening bazaar gives us an anticlimactic conclusion, with the narrator reaching a disheartening epiphany:

“I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark. Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

He concludes his narrative with failure and defeat; Mangan’s sister embodies this purported “vanity”, as he realizes that he only embarked on his quest for his own selfish desires, and that his previous hope of having a relationship with her was simply wishful thinking. He “burned with anguish and anger” as he realized that he was misguided by his feelings of a love that would never come true.

In the quote, the image of the closing bazaar seems to symbolize the state of his relationship with Mangan's sister -- the dimming lights and darkening hall embody any promising thoughts he once had, fading and disappearing forever.