A Critical Essay to the selected text – “Araby” What makes the protagonist in “Araby” a lonely person? Has he gained anything from his journey?

Abstract

The present study has been covered an overview and the analysis of the short story “Araby” to find out what makes the protagonist a lonely person, by plot points, characters and themes, and then it has been included a discussion about the gain of the protagonist from the journey. The story starts in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street. The narrator, a boy who is unnamed, believed to be at the age of around twelve (Cummings), describes the street where he lives at the very beginning of the story. He then thinks about the priest who died in the house before his family moved in, and the games that he and his friends played in the street, recalling how they were running through the back lanes of the houses and hid in the shadows to avoid people in their neighborhood, especially the boy’s uncle, and the sister of his friend Mangan. Mangan’s sister is always in the thoughts of the narrator although they talk little. The paper enables us to have an opportunity to reflect on our life: if we reflect the “gain” again in the more critical direction, we should not regard the loss of innocence as any gain: the innocence that we cannot easily retrieve it from society must be protected before it is lost; to a large extent, innocence may not be negative if we consider it as a source of happiness.