A waste is blame. A waste of breath is blame. A waste of bed-time thrashing is blame. The distraction of anticipation. A recollection of the “hardly any patience with the serious work of life.” The thwarting bash of his face. The near total worthlessness. The time J-per arrives in vanity. Driven, fueled by vanity as well. Simple conversations with M-sis focus his orbits to regarding the bazaar, the glory that will be the bazaar. Every minor detail in connection to a radiant love/lust is hyped. Every curve. Every road. Every eye. Every lamp. Every smile. Every dawn.
Male pilots refused to stop and ask for directions. An irony. The irony inherent in self-deception. Break your back, and get no insurance funds in return. And then I wonder if corporations have the right to do just that. They do. Every corporation has every right, either that defined on paper, or that defined in the moral judgment of the upcoming race of candidates fed in green for the day’s breakfast. Then again, it’s a small world we live in, or die from for that matter. The last sentence of J-per’s phallic escapades (I’m in strong suspicious that his penis does the talking while the mind does the translating, perhaps as much or even more of my utter conviction that the service man has homicidal fantasies about me) contains four words that deal with the sense of sight: gazing, darkness, saw, and eyes. A commencement and denouncement of darkness. In introduction to and conclusion to: darkness. The first sentence advises that the street J-per lived on was “blind.” A great time is spent in drawing orbits from pupils, a great time like no other, a time depriving the time allotted of others. A genius of compensation: he is careful to keep “the blind pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen.” Intuitive.
NATO strategists were loathing opening maps of the area because refolding them can be difficult and annoying. Anguish and anger. The blame: an uncle’s presence when the most opportune times arrive to sketch trajectories. Ironically, it is in the darkness. The darkness achieves yet retains the true feelings. The true truth. Anger and anguish. A perception of the darkness: a reflection on isolation and seclusion. “Enduring the gossip of the tea-table” causes him to clinch his fists and give the word “bitter” a whole new breath and depth, following an upper-cut that is (those quenched lips you were talking about Mr. Kevin eh?) A dependent of an uncle. No thanks. No welcome. A dependent nevertheless with minimal obligation, those of mouthing desires and taking coats, and kissing ass might I add. A late fulfillment to the mouthed desires fuels a resentment. Anguish and anger. An now mingling with suffering. An epiphany. The realization. And at last does the narrator have anguish, anger, sufferings, and resentment bestowed upon the truth to drive him, fuel him, free him. Even hollow drums can be painful. Painful to hear. Painful to bear. He faces phases that leave him with a painful vacant feeling, yet he nurses them.
Bombardier still pissed off about his Yugo. This city has grown to destroy this young boy's life and hopes, and craft the persona that he is as a J-per. Dublin. The mature narrator and not the naive boy is the account of hand stroke’s protagonist. "The hour when the Christian Brothers' school set the boys free." Although they were freed, they were placed into an equally grim world, where not even play brought pleasure. The preceding likened to this culture by revealing a boy's passion for a girl, a passionate lust. In any case, a passionate stroke sure as hell beats the hell out of one in front of a colorful box orbiting colorful pictures through glares through tubes. Electron tubes. Ouch. A mystification by this girl. Yet at the at the end, the girl is balanced by the girl with an "English accent" attending the booth at the bazaar. An accurate depiction of the power and persuasiveness that England has at the time had over Dublin. The antagonist, the blame: the culture, the life. In Dublin. Dublin being: "the center of paralyses" and "indeed sterile.” No fun, all play, makes Johnny a little obtuse boy. Bountiful Irish asceticism rendering hopes and dreams not only imprudent, yet immoral (I find myself depositing at times, a parallel between morals and a septic tank). Just buy the gosh darn girl your word, and yet even that word is not preserved. Ahoy to all ladies and germs, the final characters are all English, the English-Dublinish society. The pointed fingers: a repressive Dublin culture. The wisdom derived from rejection. We all achieve it at some time. Sometimes.
Totally hammered after losing a game of "quarters" to Boris. An initiation of the quest for the ideal. The quest ends in failure but results in an inner awareness and a first step into manhood. On another level, the story consists of a grown man's remembered experience, for the story is told in retrospect by a man who looks back to a particular moment of intense meaning and insight. As such, the boy's experience is not restricted to youth's encounter with first love. Rather, it is a portrayal of a continuing problem all through life: the incompatibility of the ideal, of the dream as one wishes it to be, with the bleakness of reality. This double focus-the boy who first experiences, and the man who has not forgotten - provides for the dramatic rendering of a story of first lust told by a narrator who, with his wider, adult vision, can employ the sophisticated use of irony and symbolic imagery necessary to reveal the story's meaning. The boy's character is indirectly suggested in the opening scenes of the story. He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city. Symbolic images show him to be an individual who is sensitive to the fact that his city's vitality has ebbed and left a residue of empty piety, the faintest echoes of romance upon the lust of effective strokes, and only symbolic memories of an active concern for God and fellow men. Although the young boy cannot comprehend it intellectually, he feels that the street, the town, and Ireland itself have become ingrown, self-satisfied, and unimaginative. It is a world of spiritual stagnation, and as a result, the boy's outlook is severely limited. Ignorant thus innocent. Lonely, imaginative, isolated. He lacks the understanding necessary for evaluation and perspective. He is at first as blind as his world, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by tempering his blindness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his world. The boy's manner of thought is also made clear in the opening scenes. Religion controls the lives of the inhabitants of North Richmond Street, but it is a dying religion and receives only lip service. The boy, however, entering the new experience of first love, finds his vocabulary within the experiences of his religious training and the romantic novels he has read. The result is an idealistic and confused interpretation of love based on quasi-religious terms and the imagery of romance. This convergence of two great myths, the Christian with its symbols of hope and sacrifice and the Oriental or romantic with its fragile symbols of heroism and escape, merge to form in his mind an illusory world of mystical and ideal beauty. This convergence, which creates an epiphany for the boy as he accompanies his aunt through the market place, experiences the sudden illumination the texture and content of his mind. Futility and tenacity. The ultimate quest. Yet despite the evidence—the dead house, on a dead street, in a dying city— he boy determines to bear his "chalice safely through a throng of foes.” He is blindly interpreting the world in the images of his dreams: shop boys selling pigs' cheeks cry out in "shrill litanies"; M-sis is saintly; her name evokes in him "strange prayers and praises.” The boy is extraordinarily lustsick, and from the innocent idealism and stubbornness, the realization is approached that he cannot keep the dream. He must wake to the demands of the world around him and react. React. Thus, the first half of the story foreshadows (as the man later realizes) the boy's awakening and disillusionment. The account of the boy's futile quest emphasizes both his lonely idealism and his ability to achieve the perspectives he now has. The quest ends when he arrives at the bazaar and realizes with slow, tortured clarity that Araby is not at all what he imagined. It is tawdry and dark and thrives on the profit motive and the eternal lure its name evokes in men. The boy realizes that he has placed all his love of lust and hope in a world that does not exist except in his imagination. His reality. Others’ fallacy.
"Kosovo?! We thought you said KOKOMO!" The fact that he did this morning after morning, the very act of approaching his admiree, not only suggests J-per’s adoration, yet his inability to act on his feelings as well. He has been so hampered by Dublin life that he cannot even move to speak to her. “I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her my confused adoration.” The boy is therefore completely bereft of the ability to act, he has been paralyzed to the extreme that this girl takes over control of his body. It is the girl who finally takes the initiative to speak to him one day, again suggesting that he is not in control of his own life, but she is. The conversation was unusually short and brief and due to his timidity and nervousness the boy could not even remember what his response was. “When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no.” Joyce’s vivid description of the timidity of the boy heightens the sense of realism, he did not remember a simple reply like “yes” or “no”. The fact that Joyce has made this confusion a real part of the boy expands once more on the realism of the colorless Dublin life. Maybe because of his poor family background, the boy was cautious over the use of money. To him, a florin was a great sum of money so he had to hold it “tightly” in his hand. The word “tightly” is extremely effective as it suggests constraint and unrelenting life, one that holds on to what they have, and nothing more. He went to the bazaar in a “third-class carriage of a deserted train.” He definitely considers himself to be lower class, suggesting a sense of segregation from society, a form of alienation. It is this sense of difference that emphasizes the paralysis that the boy experiences, showing the variety of methods Joyce uses to express this common theme. At the gate, he wanted to find a “sixpenny entrance.” Besides the lack of experience in a relationship, perhaps his poverty is also due in its part of the reason for his timidity. He even thought that he could gain the love of the girl by buying material things for her for as he said, “If I go … I will bring you something.”
James Joyce is able to convey to the reader that the boy had come to the point of enlightenment and disillusionment. The hope is no longer there, he becomes aware of the banality, but can do nothing to alter this awareness. However, Joyce inhibits the telling of the character of the girl by a third person narrator with the ‘I’ viewpoint, meaning the reader has to see her character through the eyes of the boy. Readers are not told whether the girl had the same passionate feelings over the boy or not, but in the eyes of the boy “She was waiting for us” on the doorstep and she took the initiative to speak to the boy “At last she spoke to me”. This clever use of narration raises doubts in the readers mind whether the feelings are reciprocated, with the feeling probably leaning towards the idea that they are not. To the boy, the girl is an image rather, than a real person. Due to this first person narrative technique, we have no idea of what kind of person she is as very little is revealed about her character as she has no interaction with other characters in the story. She adopts an image of an angel or a goddess in the story, as most of time when she “appears” before him, the darkness around him lights up. “The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there.” This personification of the lamp almost suggests it was looking for her; how it lit up her hair and “rested there”, as if it too, in his eyes, made a conscious decision to look upon her. Joyce’s facilitation of a sudden twist at the end of the story and the abrupt ending not only marks the end of the story but also the end of a relationship for the reader. As the story is written in the ‘I’ view point, the readers have identified themselves with the protagonist, and as Joyce intended it, the enlightenment of the boy also marks the enlightenment of the readers. Recognizing the prosaic, crippling paralysis of being a young boy, in an unhurried and unexotic city.
General Magoo has no comment. The prosaic, the uninspiring, the unrelenting monotony. Of Dublin. Joyce’s particular attention to detail also heightens the sense of realism, making this, as a narrative technique, particularly effective as the consequence this has on the reader is to make him or her believe what is written; Araby is a romantic term for the Middle East, and was a popular word throughout the nineteenth century, being used to express the romantic view of the east that was particularly fashionable at the time. The title also suggests that the story is about a type of romantic irony, as the boy has a romantic view of the world, and does not see that it could simply be like the mundane life of Dublin, or possibly even worse. The east was not the romantic place that the boy hoped, but the sense of the exotic and glamour of foreign culture is what attracted the boy to this idea. In the first page of the story, Joyce carefully describes the boy’s neighborhood and surroundings in three paragraphs. Using (seemingly) realistic names such as “North Richmond Street” and “Christian Brothers’ School,” (as opposed to some fancy-jazzy names) Joyce adds a great sense of reality, enabling readers to almost map out the community in which he lives. Joyce then leads the reader to the late priest’s drawing room, eloping with a detailed description of the room, appealing to our senses. Joyce successfully enables the reader to smell the musty air of the room, see the littered kitchen and touch the curled and damp books found in the kitchen. “Air, musty from having been long enclosed.” The reader is now exposed to a depressing scene of entrapment and paralysis, with the word “enclosed” suggesting that not even the air can escape the room in which we are. The description goes on, including words such as “yellow”, “rusty” and “damp”, all pertaining to an image of decay, age and paralysis, characterizing Dublin life. The story takes place in a cold “winter” at “dusk”. The use of these words help to emphasize once more the sense of paralysis; the cold affects movement as does dusk, as it is the start of darkness, which increases the difficulty of glimpsing. Through the protagonist, readers can also see the “somber” houses and “violet” sky, feel the coldness of the weather, smell the odor arouse from the “ash pits” and hear music made from the shaking of a buckled harness of a horse. The brusque abruptness. “While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist.” Here we see Joyce’s attention to detail once more; this creates the effect that the boy is observing the girl very closely indeed, heightening the sense of realism, and his admiration for her. The boy looked at her secretly, “We watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street.” Once more, the use of the word “shadow” suggests that they are dormant and watching from a paralyzed stance—they can not move out from the shadow as if they can not move from Dublin.
And to the Greatest Supporters of NATO of All (hear, hear!): I did not do it in a car
I did not do it in a bar
I will not do it in the dark
I will not do it in the park
I will not do it on a date
I will not ever fornicate
I did not do it at a dance
I did not do it in her pants
I did not get beyond first base
I did not do it in her face
I never did it in a bed
If you think that, you've been misled
I did not do it with a groan
I will not do it on the phone
I did not cause her dress to stain
I never boinked Saddam Hussein
I did not do it with a whip
I never fondled Linda Tripp
I never acted really silly
With volunteers like Kathleen Willey
There was one time with Margaret Thatcher
I chased her 'round, but could not catch her
No kinky stuff, not on your life
I wouldn't, even with my wife
And Jennifer Flowers' tale of woes
Was paid for by my right-wing foes
And Paula Jones, and those State Troopers
Are just a bunch of party poopers
I will not ask my friends to lie
I will not hang them out to dry
I did not do it last November
But if I did, I don't remember
I did not do it in the hall
I could have, but I don't recall
I never did it in my study
I never did it with my dog, Buddy
I never did it to Sox, the cat
I might have once...with Arafat
I never did it in a hurry
I never groped Ms. Betty Currie
There was no sex at Arlington
There was no sex on Air Force One
I might have copped a little feel
And then endeavored to conceal
But never did these things so lewd
At least, not ever in the nude
These things to which I have confessed
They do not count, if we stayed dressed
It never happened with a cigar
I never dated Mrs. Starr
I did not know this little sin
Would be retold on CNN
I broke some rules my Mama taught me
I tried to hide, but now you've caught me
But I implore, I do beseech
Do not condemn, do not impeach
I might have got a little tail
But never, never did I inhale.
(and now I implore you Mr. Kevin, to throw your ante against who this worshipper of NATO truly is, and oh yes, I did include topic sentences—I even bolded them for you, lol, and this time, in horror of getting my head chopped off, I attempted two manner in which to errr…express…myself, one being that of a snap-shot photo shoot, and the other of a constant stream)