Reflection on Araby

The first time I read through Araby by James Joyce I did not really understand what the main plot was, so therefore the story did not impress me too much. After reading the story over and over again before writing the first assignment I began to realize what the meaning of the story was. When the first assignment was completed I felt as though I had a thorough understanding. It turns out, I was wrong. Before completing the post-reading analysis I read the story for what I thought was one final time. During that reading I stumbled across words and even statements that had flown right over my head. I read pieces of the story and gained a totally new perspective. When the post-reading analysis was finished I decided to read the story again. When I read through the story this time I really enjoyed it. I was specifically looking for hidden thoughts that Joyce had written out. When I found some of these, they forced me to imagine what the scenes would be. When visualizing the story, it creates a whole different perspective. The whole story was interesting and noteworthy, but if I had to select a couple quotes from the story that had meaning for me, they would be; “I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man.” And “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” I found the first quote interesting and noteworthy because it can be looked at in so much depth. The quote contains all three themes of the church, money, and the quest for the Holy Grail. Money and materialism are directly stated in the excerpt, but when thinking about the quest and the church you must think deeper. The first couple times I read this quote it meant absolutely nothing to me but once given something to look for, such as the themes, I started noticing important details. I thought the second quote was interesting because when thought about in a different way it always comes back to the theme of the quest for the Holy Grail, ultimately realizing that Mangan’s sister was not the only important thing in life. The Harkness discussion and rereading the story really did have a big influence on my perspective. I went from not knowing anything about the story to feeling as though I grasped what I could. The Harkness discussion changed my impression of the story because I learned that there was so much more to the story than I could have imagined. Everyone had such a different viewpoint of the story that it made me think about the same idea in a completely different direction. For example, Mangan’s sister could have been seen as God or simply worthless. Studying Araby had little influence on how I look at life but it changed the way I look at literature. I now know that there is so much more to a story than the actual words written and when you are committed to looking deeper for the thoughts, meanings and messages the author is trying to convey, it makes the literary work so much more interesting and meaningful.