FLIGHT

In Flight by Doris Lessing we have the theme of anger, acceptance, jealousy, conflict, change,
independence, letting go and freedom. Taken from her African Stories collection the story is narrated in
the third person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story the reader realises that Lessing
may be exploring the theme of anger. Alice’s grandfather is angry about her relationship with Steven. He
does not consider it to be appropriate for a young girl of her age. If anything the grandfather feels as
though he may be losing Alice to Steven which may cause him to feel jealous of Alice and Steven’s
relationship. The reader also feels as though the grandfather has lived his life yet he is not happy with
the circumstances he finds himself in. He likes company yet since Alice’s three sisters have gotten
married the grandfather may actually feel lonely and bitter. Something that is clearer to the reader
when the grandfather tells Alice that he will tell her mother that she is waiting for Steven. It may also be
important that the grandfather is the one constant voice in the story. The reader is given an insight into
how he thinks and it is contrary to how others around him think.

It may also be a case that the grandfather does not like change. With old age comes stubbornness and a
lack of will to change one’s habits. This is very much the case when it comes to the grandfather. He is set
in his ways and his belief that Alice should not marry Steven. If anything some readers might consider
the grandfather to be selfish by way of the fact that he is only thinking about himself and not Alice’s
happiness. Whereas Alice’s mother sees nothing wrong with Alice getting married. She herself got
married at seventeen while Alice is a year older. There is also a sense of irony in the story when it comes
to the grandfather’s beliefs about Alice getting married. If anything he needs to grow up. Which is ironic
considering that he is the oldest character in the story. Times may have changed and the grandfather
has not changed with them. How the grandfather feels about Alice also results in the grandfather feeling
conflicted within himself. Alice is the last of his granddaughters and he knows that he will be lonely
when she marries Steven.

There may also be some symbolism in the story that could be important. The pigeons symbolise how the
grandfather feels about Alice. Just as they are trapped in the dovecote. Alice too is trapped at home or
at least her grandfather wishes to see he trapped at home. By freeing all the pigeons at the end of the
story the grandfather is also symbolically giving his blessing to Alice and Steven and freeing Alice. No
longer is she under his control nor does she have to do what he says. Not that Alice really listened to her
grandfather. This too could be important as it suggests that Alice has an independent streak. That she is
her own person. Regardless of what her grandfather might think on matters with her and Steven. In fact
throughout the story Alice shows herself to be independent, particularly when she is swinging freely on
the gate. It is the grandfather who lacks any sort of freedom with him being reliant on others to help
him and only his birds to occupy his time.

It is also clear that Alice is as stubborn as her grandfather. Something that is noticeable when Alice
refuses to care about her grandfather telling her mother that she is waiting for Steven. In many ways the
story is a battle of wills with Alice winning out. However the fact that Alice is crying when the birds are
free may suggest that she is fully aware of the meaning of her grandfather letting the birds fly away. She
too is flying away and will miss her grandfather. Even if they do appear to be at loggerheads throughout
the story. In reality each character in the story wins out. Alice gets the blessing of her grandfather.
Steven gets the woman he loves. Alice’s mother sees that her daughter is happy. There is complete
acceptance of the circumstances. Particularly when it comes to the grandfather who has managed to let
go of Alice and will see her grow into a woman. He may not have initially liked the idea of Alice getting
married but he puts Alice before himself. No longer is he thinking selfishly and only of himself. Which
may leave some readers to suspect that the grandfather has changed as a person. Happy for his
granddaughter to marry Steven even if it means he may be that little bit lonelier.
ARABY
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LITERATURE

A Summary and Analysis of

James Joyce’s ‘Araby’
By Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Araby’ is one of the early stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners,

the 1914 collection of short stories which is now regarded as
one of the landmark texts of modernist literature. At the time,
sales were poor, with just 379 copies being sold in the first
year (famously, 120 of these were bought by Joyce himself).
And yet ‘Araby’ shows just what might have initially baffled
readers coming to James Joyce’s fiction for the first time, and
what marked him out as a brilliant new writer.

But before we get to an analysis of ‘Araby’ (which can be

read here), a brief summary of the story’s plot – what little
‘plot’ there is. You can read the story here.

‘Araby’: plot summary

In summary, then: ‘Araby’ is narrated by a young boy, who

describes the Dublin street where he lives. As the story
progresses, the narrator realises that he has feelings for his
neighbour’s sister and watches her from his house,
daydreaming about her, wondering if she will ever speak to
him. When they eventually talk, she suggests that he visit a
bazaar, Araby, on her behalf as she cannot go herself.

The boy plans to buy her a present while at Araby, but he

arrives late to the bazaar and, disappointed to find that most
of the stalls are packing up, ends up buying nothing.

‘Araby’: analysis

‘Araby’ is marked by dead-ends, anti-climaxes, things not

going anywhere. The street on which the young narrator lives,
North Richmond Street, is ‘blind’: i.e. a cul-de-sac or dead-end
street. The narrator does go to the bazaar, Araby, but ends up
turning up too late and doesn’t buy anything. His feelings for
his female neighbour don’t lead anywhere: this is a romantic
story in which boy and girl do not get together.
Disappointments, dead ends, everywhere.

Like many of the stories

in Dubliners, ‘Araby’ is marked, then, by plotlessness, by
ordinariness, by describing mood and setting over action or
exciting plot developments. As with the other early tales
in Dubliners, ‘Araby’ is narrated in the first person by its
principal character.

Joyce arranged the 15 stories in Dubliners  so that they move

from childhood to late middle age, progressing through the
human life span more or less chronologically.

We might ask what advantage the child’s-eye view here

creates. Like the narrator of the opening story from the
collection, ‘The Sisters’, the narrator of ‘Araby’ lives with his
aunt and uncle. (Where are the parents? Have they emigrated,
leaving the children to be looked after by relatives while they
go to America in search of money and a better life? Have they
died?)
But he is our voice through the story, and the other characters
– with the notable exception of the girl he is infatuated with –
are kept at arm’s length. There is a simplicity and innocence
to his voice, describing what it feels like to experience the
pangs of first love, but there is also a knowing voice at work
too.

One of the most remarkable things about ‘Araby’, and one

which deserves closer analysis, is the style. Style is, in a sense,
everything with James Joyce: every word is used with care
and towards the creation of a very deliberate effect, and no
two stories in Dubliners  use quite the same style or for
identical reasons.

As the critic Margot Norris has observed in an analysis of

‘Araby’, the narrator describes his disappointments (failing to
talk to the girl he likes at first; then, once he has spoken to her,
failing to get her a gift at the Araby bazaar) in such a way as to
compensate for the frustrations of real life by offering, in their
place, the beauty of language.

This is there in the exoticism of the story’s title, ‘Araby’, and

what it describes, a bazaar: both ‘Araby’ and ‘bazaar’ being
terms which conjure the otherness and excitement of the
place (based on a real travelling bazaar named Araby, which
visited Dublin in 1894), in stark contrast to the more usual
English-language term, ‘market’. (Note how the narrator
refers to his aunt going ‘marketing’ at one point: ‘marketing’ is
what people do when they need to perform household chores
like shopping for groceries; but going to Araby or the bazaar is
an event, a treat.)

Consider, in this connection, the narrator’s description of the

impact seeing his beautiful neighbour has on him:

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to

romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing
I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the
flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women,
amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys
who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal
chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about
O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native
land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me:
I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of
foes.

This has a peculiar effect on him:

Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and

praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often
full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my
heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of
the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or
not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused
adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and
gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
This is a true but also heightened in its romanticism: true
because it captures what it is to be in love with a special
person, especially when in the first flushes of adolescence.

But it is also romantic in the extreme because of the religious

and courtly idea (nay, ideal) of love present in that idea of
being the girl’s cupbearer (‘I bore my chalice’), the crying (but
then, the disarmingly direct parenthetical admission of not
knowing why), and the romantic idea of Old Ireland inscribed
in that harp, which also carries a frisson of the erotic (with the
girl’s words and gestures acting like the finger’s touches all
over the boy’s body).

There are many such moments in this shortest of short stories

which repay close analysis for the way the young narrator
romanticises, but does not sentimentalise, the feeling of being
in love, perhaps hopelessly. ‘Araby’, then, is a story about
frustration and failure, but it ends on a note of ‘anguish and
anger’, without telling us what will befall the narrator and the
girl who haunts his dreams. Like many a modernist story, it is
open-ended even when, like the street where the narrator
lives, it appears to have reached its dead end.

About James Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941) is one of the most important

modernist writers of the early twentieth century. His
reputation largely rests on just four works: a short story
collection Dubliners (1914), and three novels: A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man  (1916), Ulysses  (1922), and Finnegans
Wake  (1939).

For more discussion of James Joyce, see our analysis of

Joyce’s ‘An Encounter’, our commentary on ‘The Sisters’,
our summary of ‘Clay’, and our introduction to free indirect
speech.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary

critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.
He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A
Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of
History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the
Modernist Long Poem.

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4 Comments

1. Pingback: The Best James Joyce Stories Everyone Should

Read | Interesting Literature
2. beckylindroos

October 13, 2018 at 1:04 am

Hi – nice commentary on Araby which I’ve loved reading as part of The Dubliners several times.
Interesting the way you’ve hit on the “dead ends, anti-climaxes, things not going anywhere.” I
don’t think I ever noticed that.

I did notice the boy was almost paralyzed about doing anything about the up-scale girl – like other
characters in other stories – like Dubliners in Ireland at the time.

I noticed the windows in almost every story with the characters either looking out at what they
want or in at it, but not being where what they want is. (Pastries in another early story but
elsewhere.) Sometimes there aren’t even any windows and the players are really trapped in their
views (politics, religion). It’s the same theme, desire and frustration. There are so many ways to
read these stories by Joyce – things to find, to interpret, to see.
[Link]

3. D K Powell

October 11, 2018 at 2:15 pm

The effect of reading Dubliners as a very young man has never left me. The ‘plotlessness’ of the
stories, at the time, left me bewildered, but over the years I came to admire the style and indeed to
prefer it to tacky ‘sting-in-the-tale’ or moralistic stories. my own collection of short stories is highly
influenced by Joyce’s collection though not every story is plotless and, it goes without saying, my
writing is a pale reflection of this great Irishman’s work. Thanks to your posts I’ve ordered the book
(I think I read my brother’s copy all those decades ago) and I’m looking forward to reading it again
and writing about my thoughts!
 4. Pingback: A Summary and Analysis of James Joyce's
'Araby' | collect magazine
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