Araby

Mirror Contrasts in Araby
“Araby”, a short story written by James Joyce, is a very descriptive tale that includes a lot of symbolism through its inner surroundings. Joyce writes about a young teenage boy that seems to have a slight crush on his neighbor. The scenery of the story shifts multiple times and gives off different emotions in each area. Through Joyce’s use of multiple settings, we can see that the narrator’s feelings and characteristics mirrors the neighborhood, the house, and the bizarre.
The very beginning of the story starts off with the narrator telling of the surrounding houses. He tells of North Richmond Street and how it was blind. By blind, Joyce refers to the street being a dead-end and how it was quiet until school lets out.   That tells that the neighborhood is not very populated and it seems to be dull. In paragraph three Joyce writes “The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dripping gardens where odors arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothes and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness” (403). That gives a contrast to the surrounding lifestyle of the narrator. He lives in a small town in Dublin where not much goes on. There, his experiences seem to be limited and his personality seems to be mellow and sort of lonely. He is not really exposed too much, so that accounts for his simple lifestyle.  
The house seems to be ran down and raggedy. Joyce wrote “Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers” (403). The house seems to be rather large and old. One night he describes a moment of him being in a back room of the house. He watches outside as the rain comes down hard, but no sound being in the house. He could hear the rain hitting the ground and he could see a...