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“North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.”
This is the opening line of “Araby.” Here, Joyce offers his first description of North Richmond Street which is where the majority of the text is set. Joyce establishes a somber tone through the use of words like “blind,” “uninhabited,” and “detached” which guides the reader to the conclusion that the story’s narrator is bored by his surroundings. This passage is also the first of several times that the narrator will use the color brown to describe the world around him, contributing to the sense of dull monotony that persists throughout the text.
“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. 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 dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.”
“Araby” is a coming-of-age text so it makes sense that the story begins in the world of childhood. Here, the young narrator describes how he and his friends would play in the streets after school regardless of the cold weather. The sleepy street is transformed into a kingdom in which the children’s rough-housing and make-believe is briefly able to overshadow North Richmond’s typical monotony. In this passage, Joyce also emphasizes the sights, smells, and sounds of North Richmond Street in order to fully immerse the reader in the text’s most important setting.
“I found myself in a big hall girded at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.”
In this passage, the narrator describes his first look at the Araby bazaar, the other setting in the text in addition to North Richmond Street. It is clearly an important destination to the narrator because it is the titular location. The narrator has spent the better part of the text romanticizing and fantasizing about the Araby bazaar. However, when he arrives, the bazaar is far less exciting than he imagined it would be. Joyce emphasizes the narrator’s disappointment by focusing on the bazaar’s emptiness and silence.
