The atmosphere and setting in James Joyce's "Araby".

Convinced that the Dublin of the 1900's was a center of spiri-tual paralysis, James Joyce loosely but thematically tied together hisstories in Dubliners by means of their common setting. Each of thestories consists of a portrait in which Dublin contributes in some wayto the dehumanizing experience of modem life. The boy in the story"Araby" is intensely subject to the city's dark, hopeless conformity,and his tragic yearning toward the exotic in the face of …

…as the market place ("two men were counting money on asalver"); love is represented as an empty, passing flirtation. "Araby" is a story of first love; even more, it is a portrait of aworld that defies the ideal and the dream. Thus setting in this storybecomes the true subject, embodying an atmosphere of spiritual pa-ralysis against which a young boy's idealistic dreams are no match.Realizing this, the boy takes his first step into adulthood.