Essay On Love DoesnT Always Conquer All - 1593 Words

Lois Berger Love Doesn’t Always Conquer All You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Maybe the narrator in James Joyce’s â€Å"Araby† doesn’t become a villain, but his dreams of being a hero die on the day he realizes he is powerless to get the girl he loves. This is a classic case of how romanticism negatively affects people, especially young men. There’s nothing wrong with romance in and of itself; many people read books and watch movies involving a hero and a damsel in distress. It’s when romanticism is taken too far—it’s when young people’s lives are shattered by its often misguided ideology—that problems start to arise. The boy in â€Å"Araby† starts out with his head in the clouds; he has found a girl he†¦show more content†¦This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s his imagination that helps feed his detrimental sense of romanticism. If the houses didn’t have faces and the streetlig hts didn’t have to lift their lanterns, the boy could have been saved from his heartache. In â€Å"The Motivation for Anguish in Joyce’s ‘Araby,’† the authors argue that the majority of the interactions between the narrator and Mangan’s sister are almost entirely psychological—the boy is so infatuated with her that he romanticizes everything she says and does: â€Å"It must strike us, therefore, as odd that Mangan’s sister acts as she does while talking with the narrator. The nervous turning of her bracelet as she speaks betrays a lack of self-confidence in the younger narrator’s presence which a real sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old girl is unlikely to have. . . [there is] an implication of her interest in the narrator himself. . . [this is] not the relationship which exists in this story† (Brugaletta and Hayden 13). We don’t know what the girl says in actuality, but we can only assume her words and actions must have been completely different than how the narrator describes them. It’s hard to imagine Mangan’s sister saying, â€Å"It’s well for you† (156). North Richmond Street isn’t the only thing that is blind; Harry Stone argues that the boy is just as blind as anyone—or anything—else. â€Å"That