Axis of Reality on the Short Story Araby Term Paper

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Illusion and Reality in "Araby"

In James Joyce's short story "Araby," written in 1905, but first published in 1914 in Dubliners (Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, p. 611) a young boy experiences his first sexual awakening, and finds himself endlessly fantasizing about "Mangan's sister," who lives in a house near his own. As Joyce describes Mangan's sister, from the boy's perspective "Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side." He cannot pull his image of Mangan's sister from his mind, even long enough to say his prayers. Thoughts of Mangan's sister interfere impede his concentration at school. Without understanding why, the picture inside his head of Mangan's sister, distorted or real, takes on iconic significance, substituting for reality in a way far more, in fact deliciously, exciting. However, by the end of the story, the young boy's axis of reality, which has to do, in his case, with the lives and priorities of those older than himself, pulls him back, and much-cherished hope of buying and presenting Mangan's sister with a special gift from Araby is destroyed.

The word "axis" means "a straight line around which a body rotates" (Webster's New American Dictionary, p. 36). When the boy becomes fascinated with Mangan's sister, his mind wanders far from that axis, which consists of school, church, home, and the authority of others, religious, parental, and otherwise, to a place that seems to open up an entirely new world, in which imagination and fantasy are allowed free play, and hopes, wishes, and fantasies may be entertained with abandoned.

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It is a child's kind of straying from such an axis: the first delicious stirrings of pending adulthood, and along with it, freedom from the axis of reality that (as a child's does) grounds a child's privileges, responsibilities, and activities in the rules, expectations, demands, and wishes of others older than himself or herself. For example, the heavy dominance and seriousness of Irish Catholicism is nearly palpable throughout the story. As Joyce states: "The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. As one critic points out, however:

In some ways "Araby" has nothing to say to us. Ours is not a culture of convent schools and sexual repression, and we no….....

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