Breaking Blind in Araby Miranda Pederson College

Darkness and light are everywhere, and one cannot exist without the other. However, a combination of the two creates shadows in which a world can be altered into a form of dusk, twilight. It is in this shadowy light that a person may find themselves wandering blindly, much like the character in the short story of “Araby” written by James Joyce where a boy is, in a sense, blind throughout the story until he sees truth. In his short story, “Araby,” Joyce uses a combination of diction, imagery, and light/darkness to create the motif of blindness that conveys the narrator’s experience and journey toward enlightenment.

To begin, the diction in Joyce’s “Araby” brings forth a very present idea of blindness. He begins with “North Richmond Street, being blind” as an unusual description of a street, and he goes on to say “An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end” (Joyce 1223). Immediately an idea of being blind is established, and though it is curious why a street is being described as blind, it can be deduced that perhaps the street (or more the inhabitants of it) are blind to the outside world as well. As for the house standing at the blind end, it is detached from the rest of the neighborhood and blind to the...