Araby

4 Pages 1043 Words

Innocence to Experience
In every person’s life there is a movement from a stage of innocence to a more mature and experience stage. That movement begins from the moment that he or she is brought into this world and ends when he or she dies. The movement from innocence to experience is triggered by events where he or she is forced to learn from his or her actions. Once they have learned the consequences of their actions and how to react to situations, that lesson will stick with them for the rest of their lives. They have gained more experience and, at the same time, lost a little of their innocence. That movement is demonstrated in “Araby,” written by James Joyce, with a young boy who seems to be a little naive an is going through things in his life that he does not quite understand yet. It is also shown in “A & P,” written by John Updike, through the eyes of a teenager named Sammy who seems to think using something else instead of his brain. In both of these stories certain events happen the these two characters that makes them more experience and think about life more maturely at the end.
In “Araby,” the boy with no name seems to fall in love with his friend’s sister but never really tells her. When she steps outside, the boy’s “heart leaps” (Joyce 843), and he rushes so that he can follow her every morning. Maybe that is the way the boy is trying to impress her. Eventually, the boy becomes so preoccupied with impressing the girl that he begins to just forget about everything else that is going on in his life: "I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and buy day in the classroom, her image came between me and the page I strove to read […] I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play." (Joyce 844). One d...