What is your response to James Joyce's "Araby"? What do you agree and disagree with in this piece? What does the author get right or wrong?

One way to think about these questions about Joyce's short story "Araby" (published in 1914 in his book Dubliners) is to consider what Joyce is trying to represent in this piece and whether or not he succeeds. The story is told in first-person from the perspective of a boy who goes to school, plays with his friends in the streets, and has a crush on a girl who is never given a name but who is known as Mangan's sister. All he wants to do is go to the bazaar, which takes place on the weekend, to buy something for the girl. After he promises this to her, the boy describes how, during the course of the next week as he waited for his chance to go to the bazaar, everything else in his life became drab. He explains,




What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. . . . I answered few questions in class. I watched my master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.







Everything he normally did and all the people with whom he normally associated became essentially meaningless or childlike to him as he waited, with great apprehension and anxiety, for the bazaar.
Joyce focuses in on the boy's feelings as he waits for Saturday evening to arrive. You might consider whether you think he does this effectively and, as you do so, think about how he describes the way the boy felt before his conversation with the girl, as he waited for the bazaar, and then, finally, what he was thinking and feeling at the bazaar itself. Are there certain words Joyce uses? Does the tone he use or the setting he builds throughout the story add anything of value to our understanding of the boy's experience?
Another aspect of the story to think about is how the relationships between the boys and the adults in their world, as well as between the boys and the girls in their neighborhood, are represented. Do you think that Joyce does a good job of describing these relationships? Can you relate to how the boy thinks about his uncle, his aunt, Mrs. Mercer, and so on? What about with how he relates to the girl? At what period in your life might you have felt similarly to how the boy was feeling, or might have related to girls (or boys) and adults in this way?
You might say that the boy was crushed by the reality of the bazaar, which turned out not to be all that he made it in his mind, and that this realization also demystified the girl for him, "bursting his bubble," as it were. What are your reactions to this ending? Could you see something similar happening in your own life?