Araby The Young Man example essay topic

The two short stories, "A&P" by John Updike and "Araby" by James Joyce, portray two young men moving on vehicles of desire, uplifting standards, romantic impulses, and failure towards maturity. Each vehicle is natural and suitable because all young people go through trials of love and loss in their lives. Desire sparks each boy to move to the next stage of romantic impulses while being oppressed by religion / community standards and resulting in a failed attempted to win the attention of their love interests. Each vehicle is a trail that results in error in the young men's lives as was as a cold distinction between their fantasy and reality. In "Araby", the narrator is the young character's older self, pausing back on attempt to help a young lady, Mangan, who is oppressed by her obligations to her faith and is not able to go to the bazaar Araby. The young man's, whose name is a mystery through out the short story, desires and fantasies tug at his heart and encourage him to talk to her.

However Mangan finally spoke to him first, "When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby". The young man, taking on the role of a hero that he has played with her so many times in his mind, says he will bring her back something if he goes to the bazaar. When he gets to Araby his fantasies crumble because the bazaar is not at all like he romanticized it to be. After a long day of wait he finally has leave to go around 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. He is almost stopped from going by his aunt because Sunday is the day of the Lord.

He arrives to find that the bazaar is closing and he is force to pay a full admission fee because of the hour. His dreams of Mangan slowly reappear and take the form of a flirtatious young lady who is rude to him when he approaches her shop. "I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real". Realizing that his dreams are and could only be fantasies his mystical bazaar slowly fades to dark and dreary place. "Araby" is a classic example of Love's rites of maturity. As the story progresses the young man unwraps his desires for Mangan but at the same time keeps her so close to his heart that he does not really let the reader know who he is talking about.

"All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love!' many times". You can see that the boy's fantasies are pure and true. He goes as so far as to imply that he is truly in love with this girl.

But after attending Araby the young man convinces himself that he only sees this girl as a lustful object and will never have her. Unlike "Araby", in John Updike's short story, "A&P", a young man named Sammy, who is the checkout boy at the grocery store, lusts after girls in a way common for immature boys. Sammy replaces the young man's desire in "Araby" with a crude appetite. Sammy is an average boy that gets caught up in his own fantasies when three girls dressed in bathing suites enter the A&P to purchase fancy herring snacks for one girl's mother. Sammy refers to the prettiest of the three girls as Queenie. "She kind of led them...

She didn't look around, not this queen... ". Sammy's lustful desire for Queenie to pay attention to him sparks his romantic impulse to be chivalrous after they get scolded by the manager. He stands up for the girls against authority stating that he is quitting because of the embarrassment L engel forced on the girls.

However, reality hits Sammy when he walks out of the store. The girls are nowhere to be found leaving him alone to fend for himself against the world. Like "Araby", Sammy's failed attempt to see reality shadows him from seeing that he is hurting himself. The both take actions against evil for the ones who can fulfill their request for love. They come in contact with reality when neither girl returns affection. The young man in "Araby" is a bit luckier than Sammy because he realizes earlier that his attempted has failed before it had even begun.

Their rites lead them to maturity with a hard lesson on their shoulders. Even though failure was in store for both boys they still came out alive with only feelings hurt. All boys in one stage of life take on the ceremony of a hero as a rite into manhood. Araby develops anger because he feels that his intentions were rash when it came to Mangan and Sammy doesn't receive any credit for his actions.

Both boys, using the element, which drove them through trial and error, are now men entering a world colder and more harsh then they romanticized before..