Araby,_James_Joyce__Images_Of_Blindness_As_Illumination

Araby, James Joyce: Images Of Blindness As Illumination 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 colour, sister, shadow, nameless, dark, white, story, one, narrator’s, darkness, araby, young, yearns, while, travels, street, stood, sees, seen, protagonist, play, over, now, narrator, mangan’s, mangan, lit, light, life, continually, clearly, childhood, caught, cast, brown