Critical Analysis of Araby

Life isn’t always a bed of roses. It’s not some fantasy wherein you always get what you want. It’s not an empty road that you can walk over as you please. Life is… what you make it. During your journey, it is inevitable that you will experience a few bumps and obstacles. However, the choice is always yours, whether you will push through with it, or give up and be left to rot. The narrator in the story felt like he had a big, gaping hole in his chest. In reality, everyone feels like there is something missing at some point in their life. We are drowned in the illusion that we need to fill that with whatever we can manage. We are manipulated with rash thinking, and we only focus on appeasing that longing for fulfillment. In the story, the narrator just easily gave up. I didn’t like it, because it seemed as if the writer ran out of time and just ended the story with a mediocre, seemingly-mysterious ending.

The writer wanted to champion the idea that everyone experiences frustration in their life. As you can see, almost all the characters were nameless. The narrator was simply the narrator, and the apple of his eye was simply labeled as “Mangan’s sister”. It is in this façade of anonymity that the perspective of a universal audience was introduced. As true as this may be, people are intelligent beings. They do not simply give up. They find ways to be happy, because that’s just how they are. The narrator was, at first, extremely excited about his love for Mangan’s sister and the wonders of the bazaar, but his expectations were failed as he encounters a harsh reality. His love for Mangan’s sister was neck-on-neck with the other important things in his life, such as school work. His uncles tardiness even proved to be a factor for his failure to arrive early at the bazaar. These are only small obstacles in life, and one can easily find a way to go around it.

The story seems so sad, and the narrator’s desires were never fulfilled, and his life

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