Araby, James Joyce: Images Of Blindness As Illumination

2 Pages 618 Words

Throughout Joyce’s short story of a nameless adolescent boy, the recurring theme of colour and darkness is one of several literary devices deployed in the narrative to engage the reader in understanding the transformation which the protagonist is experiencing. In addition to the use of sounds, and senses as a whole, sight is quite clearly used to segregate many differences in the young boys life.

Taking a broad examination of the text and sighting each reference to colour and shadow, it is only the narrator’s outside world, which he yearns to understand and belong to, that is described in light and colour. The object of our narrator’s affections, also nameless, is the sister of Mangan; she is continually viewed in white or brown, and cast in lamplight. With the exception of Mangan’s sister, only objects and nature are given colours: “The other houses of the street... gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces”; “Among these I found a few paper-covered books…I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow”; “The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet”; “While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet”; “the words Cafẽ Chantant were written in colouerd lamps”.

The narrator and his young friends, all of whom are nameless except for Mangan, are continually referenced in terms of shadows and descriptions of the neighborhood are all dark: “The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses…to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens…to the dark odorous stables”; “If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow”; “…we watched her from our shadow”; “we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps”.

Comparing the two uses of colour and darkness, it can clearly be “seen” that the narrator (perhaps nameless to identify Joyce himself, as observed by other readers and scholars) views his c...