A Story Beneath A Story

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A Story Beneath a Story

The setting in Joyce’s Araby is saturated with descriptive detail providing a unique insight into the character’s personality and his opinions on love, life, and religion. The way his environment has been described, sheds light on some emotions the character is experiencing. The setting as mold shapes the character’s views on love and life while the setting as mirror creates a mood that the character is in which can be explained through his isolation from others. Setting occurs as mirror and mold during a journey of a young man in Araby on his quest to find some form of comfort in his isolated world.
The setting in Araby as mold can be seen clearly throughout the character’s word choice of explaining his environment around him because it actually shapes him into the person he is with a personality that is clearly evident to be shy and isolated. Certain words that the character uses describe mass amounts of information pertaining to the character’s life. The description he gives of his friend’s sister whom he longs for to end his seemingly long history of loneliness is filled with descriptive observations that give us a sense of adoration. “I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood”(61, Araby). The character was so shy that he could not even talk to the girl. This shyness shapes him into a person that is even shyer and who wants a companion even more than before. His adoration is also expressed through his detail while explaining his experiences of going to the market with his aunt. With all of the things going on around him such as drunken men and bargaining women, curses of laborers, and street singers who sang about troubles of their native land, her name still lay in his thoughts. This explanation provides much more unapparent information of his adoration for his mate. The things he points out is important to pay ...