r. By becoming infatuated with Mangan’s sister, the boy is able to escape his drab surroundings and loneliness into a fantasy romance, but all the while remains in darkness. In other words, though he can escape the reality of his life by fanaticizing about Mangan’s sister, the boy never changes the reality that is his life. The boy lives in a house in which “the former tenant, a priest, had died” (Joyce, 15) and one night he goes into the drawing room where the priest had died and says, "Some distant lamp or window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves…I pressed my palms together until they trembled, murmuring “O love! O love!” (Joyce, 16). Again, we see the boy in a dark setting because darkness is the reality of his life and even though he is fantasizing about his love, he cant completely escape the darkness or reality. At this point in the story, the boy doesn’t realize that his feelings for Mangan’s sister stem from adolescent fantasy or a crush, so to say, that he has developed for her. Light is used to create a fairy tale world of dreams and illusions. Joyce uses the imagery of light when describing Mangan's sister: “she was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door” (Joyce, 16). The thought of Mangan’s sister brings joy into the boys drab life and when she talks to him about the bazaar he describes “the light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there…” (Joyce, 17). The way he describes her in that instance almost gives her a heavenly angelic presence with the light seeming to shine off her body as if she is a perfect vision of beauty. In his use of this imagery of the light, Joyce is trying to show the reader that the boy’s judgment or view of things may be overly...
