gan’s sister is worshiped by the narrator and therein lies the prison. “Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance”. The protagonist in Araby is obsessed with Mangan’s sister and can not escape seeing her image everywhere he goes. This is further illustrated in the following passage: “I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read”. In addition the religious imagery conjured by Mangan’s sister, the bazaar itself is also a religious symbol. This is shown in the following excerpt from Harry Stone’s explanation of symbolism in Araby: The interior of the building is like a church. The great central hall, circled at half its height by a gallery, contains dark stalls, dim lights, and curtained, jar-flanked sanctuaries. Joyce wants us to regard this temple as a place of worship (Stone 175). In fact, even the narrator proves to understand the religious symbolism when he says “I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service”. The narrator’s trip to the bazaar is journey, but even here he can not escape the images of religion. Even here he can not escape the image of the Virgin Mary. He sees a young saleslady standing at a door of one of the stalls, flirting with two men. This is paralleled by the image of Mangan’s sister standing in her doorway flirting with the narrator. When he realizes the parallelism, he experiences an epiphany. His worshiped angel is only a girl, just like the ordinary girl who stands before him now (Stone 175). When he realizes how he has been deceiving himself, his “eyes burned with anguish and anger”. When the boy realizes the hold the church has had on him, he feels enraged and disgusted. Religious imagery and the use of religion as a captor from which the protagonists yearn to escape can be s...
