‘Instructor’s Name’
‘Subject’
Short stories about love
Alienation and initiation are two important themes in cotemporary short fiction. Literature exists through experience, and, more often than not, the protagonist of the story represents the society we live in and the experiences of every man. Particularly, in modern fiction, the adolescent hero and his struggles to embrace adulthood has been a major theme. Most stories having an adolescent protagonist portray the coming of age or the initiation of the young hero. This essay is an attempt to compare the portrayal of the experience of initiation of two such protagonists, from the stories John Updike's A & P and James Joyce's Araby.
‘A&P’ is a story written by John Updike, and was first published in the year 1961. It talks about a day in the life of a teenage clerk, Sammy, who works in the A&P grocery. During a routine day, three girls walk in the store with swimsuits, and this does not bode well with store manager, Lengel, who admonishes them. He asks them to come decently dressed next time when they visit the store.
Sammy stands up for the girls, and resigns his job as a mark of protest, despite the manager’s warning that this might disappoint his parents. However, once he steps out of the store the girls had already left without thanking or showing any signs of appreciation to Sammy’s gesture, and he stands there alone contemplating about his future now that he is jobless.
‘Araby’ was written by James Joyce as a part of the collection titled ‘Dubliners,’ which was published in the year 1914. The story is narrated in first person by a boy who lives in North Richmond Street. He has a secret infatuation on the sister of one his friends, Mangan. One day Mangan’s sister talks to the narrator and asks him whether he was going to Araby.
The narrator promises to bring her something from Araby, and after negating his aunt’s and uncle’s doubts he finally sets out to the bazaar. However, the vision of sexuality he encounters in the bazaar completely disappoints him, and his idealization of both the Araby bazaar and Mangan’s sister is destroyed. He stands alone in the bazaar with anger and shame oozing out of his mind.
The first similarity between both these works is that both the protagonists live in restricted cultures. Lengel in A&P is the representative of the society, which allows men to tell women how they should dress, puts pressure on women to look beautiful, and demeans women’s character and self-confidence by reducing them to just beautiful show-pieces.
"Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy."
Lengel epitomizes all that is restrictive about the culture of the US during the 1960s. Sammy, on the other hand, represents the cultural and sexual rebellion that was taking place during this era, and by supporting Queenie and her friends he chose to exhibit his opposition towards this restrictive cultural system.
In the same way, the narrator of ‘Araby’ too shares a disdain for the cultural set up of his society. He describes his neighborhood in Dublin to be grim and oppressed by Catholicism. The very description of the North Richmond Street is an allusion to the closed nature of the culture. It is called a quiet street with an uninhabited house situated at a blind end.
Thus, the narrator describes his dwelling as an insular dead end from which escape is impossible. When describing the street, he says the houses had "brown imperturbable faces" and seem "conscious of the decent lives within them”. By coupling decency and a stifled dwelling together, he expresses his dissent towards the life in the city of Dublin.
Both the teenagers view the respective female protagonists to be an escape from their monotonous lives. Sammy sees Queenie as a representation of the ‘upper class life’, which he is deprived of. He aspired to be like her and develops an admiration for her. Araby’s narrator is first obsessed with Mangan’s sister and then with the Araby bazaar. Both the girl and the bazaar represent exoticism to the narrator, and he sees them as an escapade from his life.
When the boy in ‘Araby’ and Sammy make chivalrous gesture in showing their discontent over the societal rules, they do not just do it for the sake of romance, but they make a stand against the established order. Sammy takes on Lengel, who is a friend of his parents, his manager and a Sunday school teacher, and in more ways than one represent the establishment.
In the end, both Sammy and the boy in Araby suffer disappointment. They are discontented with the rules of the society they live in and they exhibit their dissent against it. Both the boys are aided by the quest for love and in this quest they suffer disillusionment and disappointment. While Sammy’s story has a hopeful ending, the plight of the narrator of Araby is ambivalent and it is clear that years later he felt regret about this incident. They both learn to constrict their imaginations and find out that reality sometimes is much cruel. However, they replace their chivalry with realism, and as a result of these incidents, they take a firm step from boyhood to manhood.
Works Cited
Joyce, James. Araby. 1914. web. <http://fiction.eserver.org/short/araby.html>. 1 November 2014.
Kelly, Joseph. Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Print.
Norris, Margot. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's "Dubliners". Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Print.
Robertson, Alice and Barbara Smith. Teaching in the 21st Century: Adapting Writing Pedagogies to the College Curriculum. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Schilb, John and John Clifford. Making Literature Matter: An Anthology for Readers and Writers. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. Print.
Updike, John. A&P. 196`. Web. <http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/>. 1 November 2014.
