The narrator
is an idealistic young boy who conflates his crush on Mangan's sister with religious and/or epic
importance. He plans his day around getting glimpses and opportunities to see Mangan's sister.
He imagines that his daily routines are actually filled with more importance as he changes those
routines into quests he performs for Mangan's sister.
These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my
chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange
prayers and praises which I myself did not understand.
When Mangan's sister asks him about the bazaar, , the narrator sees this a a connection
with her, even a sign she is trying to indicate to him. He determines to go to Araby to buy her
a souvenir, but in his mind it is more like a holy grail. For the narrator, "Araby"
with its reference to Arab culture and the Middle East, represented something exotic: a great
destination for someone on a quest for the girl he has feelings for.
Upon
arriving at Araby, the narrator is disenchanted by the nonchalant, profit-interested workers.
And it is at this moment that he has an epiphany that Araby is not as exotic as he'd thought,
that Mangan's sister probably had not given him a second thought, and that his quest is not
nearly as epic as it had been in his mind. The story is called "Araby" because it at
first represented an exotic destination of a quest and then, following the epiphany, it was the
site of the narrator's disenchantment.
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