Joyce’s Araby begins as a story about a young boy and his first love, his neighbor referred to in the story as Mangan’s sister. However, the young boy soon turns his innocent love and curiosity into a much more intense desire, transforming this female and his journey to the bazaar into something much more intense and lustful. From the beginning, Joyce paints a picture of the neighborhood in which the boy lives as very dark and cold.
Even the rooms within his house are described as unfriendly, “Air, musty from having long been enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old and useless papers. ” The young boy sees all of this unpleasant setting around him, and we see Mangan’s sister portrayed as being above all that, almost as the one and only bright spot and positive thing in his life. The first sign of the boy’s true desire and love for this girl occurs when he is sitting in his room almost day dreaming of the girl.
With the boy’s quote “But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires,” it is obvious that this girl has intense control over the young boy even before they interact in any direct form. His life and emotions are completely tied up with this girl and he finds it hard to live his everyday life because of that. Once he has his encounter with the girl and they discuss the upcoming bazaar, his desire and focus completely changes to attending the upcoming event. However, his true desire, Mangan’s sister, has not changed.
Attending the bazaar and getting her a gift is simply an extension of his obsession and desire for this girl. Now, he has something specific to focus on and look to in their relationship. Immediately after he tells her how he will buy her a gift, his thoughts turn to “What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after the evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against work of school. ” Again, the boy has no focus or use for anything else going on in his life other than being involved with his love.
In comparing this to Susan Minot’s Lust, we see many similarities in that both main characters of the stories have desire and intense wanting, but they are different in form. Minot uses many small, short encounters and stories to portray the main character’s life and emotions. Similar to Araby, the settings and atmosphere in which the young girl’s life takes place is very negative and unfriendly. Just from the first paragraph describing one of her boys, “In his illegal car we drove to the reservoir, radio blaring, talking fast, fast, fast.
He got kicked out sophomore year,” we see that the people she is associating with and the settings are not very positive. Similar Mangan’s sister in Araby, the only positive light and desire the main character has are interactions with boys and boyfriends, but all seem to only last for a very brief time. The girl’s desire is more mature and sexually than the young boy’s in Araby, most likely because of her age and background. Araby has a great deal of religious influence, so the young boy is desiring love and a soul mate, since he is being brought up in such a church-based environment.
The girl in Lust seems to deep down has those same desires to find a true love and even a soul mate, but those feelings are lost and she is only able to find strictly physical, lustful relationships. She feels if she allows her self to be that way, then she is going to find a person to true and desire. One similarity in the premise of the two stories is the influence of alcohol on the situations and desires. In Araby, the young boy must wait seemingly forever for his uncle to come home so he can go to the bazaar.
However, he ends up coming home so late because he was out drinking all night that the boy ends up being late. In Lust, the female is a student who lives in a partying, wild atmosphere. She talks about how they go to houses and drink and “you’d never know who would end up where or with whom. ” While it is not directly stated, alcohol is the reason why many of her sexual encounters occur. And while it seems that sex is what she desires, it is really alcohol that is ruining her desire and longing for love and a caring companion of the opposite sex by leading to all these lustful encounters.