Araby by James Joyce Araby by James Joyce North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces. Audiobook of Araby by James Joyce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nT_qPiPaDs&t=43s The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all ...
Araby by James Joyce Learn English with Short Stories
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Hello d.c Hariri what does strode mean???
Hi Soroosh,
Strode is the past tense of ‘stride’, which means to walk briskly and energetically with long steps.
Hello Dr Hariri. I have two questions:
1.What does vanity in this story mean?
2.Does it have any particular reason that we don’t get to know the main character and his crush’s name?
This short story is symbolic of any person devoid of love and promising changes, and I think vanity here refers to these desires that fail to be satisfied. For this reason, the narrator and his love are anonymous in the story so that the reader could attribute them to themselves and their loved ones or crushes.
I also think the anonymous narrator who is loveless and confused is suffering from too many internal conflicts. He fails to communicate with others, and the bazaar is just a pretext to stimulate him to pursue his dreams and desires.
I found this story both beautiful and hard to understand. But as I more read it I started to empathize with the main character.
I guess he had really high expectation of love. He was more in love with his own imaginations and expectations of the relationship he could have with the girl, than with who she really was. Because he hardly even knew her. And that caused him a sense of disappointment and epiphany at the end.
That’s right. In English, we say, “desperate time calls for desperate measures”. After all, the narrator barely knew Mangan’s sister, and for this reason, I don’t think he had a crush on her. I think he was desperately loveless and searching for any random person he could possibly love. Additionally, the bazaar symbolizes our spiritless world, full of materialism and lacking in love.