esired. His eyes are "often full of tears.".(276) Walking with his aunt to shop on Saturday evenings he imagines that the girl's image accompanies him, and that he protects her in "places the most hostile to romance." (276) Here, Joyce reveals the epiphany in the story: "These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes."(276) He is unable to talk to the girl. Drifting away from his schoolmates' boyish games, the boy has fantasies in his isolation, in the ecstasy and pain of first love.Finally the girl speaks to the boy. She asks him if he is going to Araby. He replies that if he does he will bring her a gift, and from that the moment his thoughts are upon the potential sensuality of "the white border of a petticoat". (277) The boy cannot sleep or study and his school work suffers had hardly any patience with the serious work of lifeseemed to me childs play, ugly monotonous childs play. (277) The word Araby "cast an Eastern enchantment" (277) over him, and then on the night he is to go to the bazaar his uncle neglects to return home. Neither the aunt nor uncle understands the boy's need and anguish, thus his isolation is deepened. We begin to see that the story is not so much a story of love as it is a rendition of the world in which the boy lives.The second part of the story depicts the boy's inevitable disappointment and realization. In such an atmosphere of "blindness"(277) the aunt and uncle unaware of the boy's anguish, the girl not conscious of the boy's love, and the boy himself blind to the true nature of his love-the words "hostile to romance" (276) take on ironic overtones. These overtones deepen when the boy arrives too late at the bazaar. It is closing and the hall is "in darkness."(278) He recognizes "a silence like that which pervades a church after a service",(278) but the bazaar is dirty and disappointing. Two men are "counting money on a salver...
