araby英文

The setting of Araby is immensely important; dreary, dark Dublin is the living, symbolic backdrop for the story.[citation needed] The gloomy atmosphere of North Richmond street that actually sets the scene at the start of the story is an anticipation of what lies ahead for the little boy in the bazaar of Araby. The first sentence of the story lets us know that North Richmond street is "blind," and that the Christian Brothers’ School did not so much dismiss students for the day as "set them free." A quick scan of the important adjectives in the first paragraph -- "blind," "quiet," "uninhabited," "detached," "square," "decent," "brown," "imperturbable" -- quickly presents a world that is practical, simple, and unmitigatingly stultifying. As mentioned before, the boys who play in the neighbourhood are able, somehow, to discover some beauty and wander even from these simple surroundings, but to do so they must become connoisseurs of darkness: the lanterns on North Richmond are "feeble," the lanes are "dark" and "muddy," the houses “sombre” in the winter twilight, the "dark dripping gardens" redolent with the smell coming from their “ashpits.” This description of the street and the lives the boys live on it serve as the backdrop that we will use to understand how much more imaginative the Araby market will be: or will not be.[citation needed] Of course, the story’s greatest irony is just how misnamed the Araby market is. It is certainly not a wondrous evocation of the West’s idealized and romanticized notions of the Middle East. Rather, it is exactly the sort of disappointing market you would expect to appear in the Dublin Joyce describes. It is dark, and mostly empty, and hushed, and more about money than anything else. The market at the end of the story, by more resembling the rest of his life than the image of it he had conjured in his daydreams, forces the narrator to a bleak realization: the stark realities of day-to-day living have little to do with the romantic notions we carry in our heads.[citation needed]StyleJoyce's writing in Dubliners is neutral; he rarely uses hyperbole or emotive language, relying on simplistic language and close detail to create a realistic setting. This ties the reader's understanding of people to their environments. He does not tell the reader what to think, rather they are left to come to their own conclusions; this is evident when contrasted with the moral judgements displayed by earlier writers such as Charles Dickens. This frequently leads to a lack of traditional dramatic resolution within the stories.It has been argued (by Hugh Kenner in Joyce's Voices, among others)[2] that Joyce often allows his narrative voice to gravitate towards the voice of a textual character. For example, the opening line of 'The Dead' reads "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet." She is not, in this instance, "literally" run off her feet, and neither would Joyce have thought so; rather, the narrative lends itself to a misuse of language typical of the character being described.Joyce often uses descriptions from the characters' point of view, although he very rarely writes in the first person. This can be seen in Eveline, when Joyce writes, "Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne". Here, Joyce employs an empirical perspective in his description of characters and events; an understanding of characters' personalities is often gained through an analysis of their possessions. The first paragraph of A Painful Case is an example of this style, as well as Joyce's use of global to local description of the character's possessions. Joyce also employs parodies of other writing styles; part of A Painful Case is written as a newspaper story, and part of Grace is written as a sermon. This stylistic motif may also be seen in Ulysses (for example, in the Aeolus episode, which is written in a newspaper style), and is indicative of a sort of blending of narrative with textual circumstances.The collection as a whole displays an overall plan, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in The Dead. Great emphasis is laid upon the specific geographic details of Dublin, details to which a reader with a knowledge of the area would be able to directly relate. The multiple perspectives presented throughout the collection serve to present a broad view of the social and political contexts of life in Dublin at this time.