The narrator
in the story idolizes and romanticizes Mangan's sister, a teenage girl a few years older than he
is. He has hardly spoken to her but, nevertheless, she is an object of adoration to him. He has
what might be called a schoolboy crush on the girl, but he feels it with all the acute intensity
of adolescent love and tortured desire. He thinks about her often:
Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side
to side. Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door....When she
came out on the doorstep my heart leaped....I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual
words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
He also expresses his adoration below:
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 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.
It is clear from these descriptions that he is in love with what
she represents. She is a symbol of purity, of beauty, and of the exotic to him. She symbolizes,
in his imagination, the alternative to his dull, schoolboy world. He builds her into a romantic
idol he can worship.
In reality, the brown dress she wears and her
commonplace speech and activities hint to us that she is a part of, rather than separate from,
the drab Dublin world the narrator inhabits. Nevertheless, because he doesn't know her well, he
can build her into a dream figure, just as he builds thebazaar into a dream event. In his mind,
the bazaar, which represents the exotic and escape from Dublin, merges or conflates in his mind
with Mangan's sister so that reader is tempted to call her Araby. It is only at the end of the
story that the boy's fantasies deflate.
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