Joyces Araby versus Updikes A & P Essay -- James Joyce John Updike

Joyces Araby and Updikes A & P A Culture impertinent to RomanceAraby by James Joyce and A & P by washstand Updike are two stories which, in spite of their many differences, have more in common. In both of these initiation stories, the friends move from one exemplify of life to another and encounter disillusionment along the way. Looking patronize upon his boyhood in Irish Catholic Dublin in the early 1900s, the fabricator of Arabygives an account of his first failed love. Captivated by Mangans older sister, the boy promises to stupefy her a gift from a bazaar that snaps the mystical name of Araby. Sammy, a nineteen-year-old cashier at the local A & P in an unnamed coastal town north of Boston, narrates A & P. Like Joyces boy, Sammy also attempts to pass on the attention of a beautiful girl by making a chivalric gesture. In both cases, romance gives way to reality, and difference of opinion occurs when the protagonist finds himself in discord with the values of the society in which he lives. Joyces Araby and Updikes A & P are initiation stories in which the adolescent protagonist comes into conflict with his culture.Both protagonists live in restrictive cultures. The narrator of Araby portrays the Dublin that he grew up in as grim and oppressed by Catholicism. He begins his accounting with a description of North Richmond Street, where the somber houses wear brown imperturbable faces and seem conscious of the decent lives within them (Joyce 728). In this description, Joyce links decency and a stifled life together. Filled with cold acquit gloomy rooms, the house where the boy resides reminds the reader of a tomb (729). A priest died in the back drawing room, and air, musty from having been long enclosed, is associated with books... ...his jam and illusions? Chivalry has failed, both for Joyces boy and for Sammy. Their efforts seem wasted, for their gallant gestures go unseen. However, Sammys story leaves the reader hopeful. His fate has not yet be en decided. Sammy loses his job but gains the ennoble of unsuspected hero (737). He claims his right to be an individual in a puritanical, conservative, and uncompromising culture. In Joyces Araby and Updikes A & P, two boys replace their ideas of valor with modern-life realism and inch their way closer to manhood.Works CitedJoyce, James. Araby. Making publications Matter An Anthology for Readers and Writers. Eds. John Clifford and John Schilb. Boston Bedford, 1999. 728-32.Updike, John. A & P. Making books Matter An Anthology for Readers and Writers. Eds. John Clifford and John Schilb. Boston Bedford, 1999. 733-37.