Close Reading/Body Paragraph #1

I decided to focus on the paragraph from “Araby” when the narrator describes Mangan’s sister as a “figure” and how she was “defined by the light from the half opened door”. Also in this paragraph the setting was described as a “silent street” with “dark muddy lanes”. James Joyce definitely sets up a very dreary and dismal setting which is then perforated by the image of Mangan’s sister, who is surrounded by light and is depicted as almost angelic. Describing her as "figure" instead of perhaps a body or a person says something about the narrator, because it shows that he sees her as someone more than a person he wants to get to know, but a symbol of something bigger. I think that by portraying her as higher up on the doorstep, having an authoritative voice with her brother, and being bathed in light sort of symbolizes the narrator’s wish to transcend everything that is dull around him. I see the narrator as someone who wants to be above everything that he lives in his daily life such as his lack of parents, his apathy towards school, and his overall unappealing landscape. Mangan’s sister is a symbol of this transcendence which is why he keeps her in his mind all the time and makes excuses to see her, which is shown in the line “I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes”. He considers everything in his daily life the foe, which he battles by instead focusing on the girl, or rather the “chalice”. This dream of transcendence is also why he focuses all of his energy on going to the bazaar to bring back something for Mangan’s sister, because it is yet another excuse to not focus on things like school and be in a different place of mind. It is only in the end when he realizes all of his attempts at transcendence were in vain, when he says “gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”