Escapism and the Exotic Theme Analysis

In the text both Mangan’s sister and the Araby market offer an escape from the ordinary, from the dull, brown picture of Dublin that the narrator otherwise describes as the world he lives in. The narrator makes his boredom with everyday life very clear when he refers to his former boyhood antics as the “career of our play,” making even play seem like a kind of work. Similarly, his descriptions of school paint a picture of busywork, with a “master” most concerned about whether his pupils might be “beginning to idle.”

Mangan’s sister offers a mental escape from this world. He thinks of her “even in places most hostile to romance,” and daydreams about her rather than doing his work in school. The Araby market seems to offer the narrator a similar kind of escape—yet the market offers an escape he not only can daydream about, but one he can actually go to. In the narrator’s sheltered world, the word “Araby” alone indicates something foreign to him, as it refers to an Eastern “Arabian” world that is so distant from the narrow, cloistered world of Ireland that he is used to (the story is set well before globalization would have made the rest of the world seem accessible to people living in Ireland; rather the narrator’s world is one in which people who live in Ireland are unlikely to travel very far away from their home, much less ever leave the country). The narrator constantly refers to Araby as “eastern” and clearly relishes in the exotic connotation of the “magical name.”

However, when the narrator actually reaches the market, he is disappointed by the reality of what he finds: “porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets” and people talking in English accents. He realizes that the Araby market is not truly exotic, not truly an escape, but rather little more than a thin veneer of exoticism lamely pasted over his own regular world. And in this realization about the Araby market, he also seems to see that his own sense of his “exotic” love for Mangan’s sister was similarly just a mask, a fake “escape” rather than a real journey to a new and distant place. He also realizes that his sense that he could truly escape to these “exotic” places – both the market and love of Mangan’s sister – was vanity, a mistaken belief in his own specialness, his own uniqueness. And, further, the fact that the Araby market exists at all, and that young men and women flirt within it to pass the time, suggests that even his desire for an escape from the everyday is itself common and everyday.