James Joyce’s short story “Araby” depicts an adolescent boy’s disillusionment- disillusionment with love and reality. Brought up in dreary and dismal surroundings of Dublin with his uncle and aunt in an uninhabited house in restrictive catholic cultures, the boy seems to be lonely and repressed throughout the story. He pines for the relish of romance and love. But in the joyless and loveless daily lives of Dubliners, nowhere in his environment does he find an outlet for his feelings. All of a sudden, he finds a beautiful girl, Mangan's sister, into his dark world and the very girl is the light in his romantic fantasy, someone who will lift him out of darkness, he thinks. In his mind, she is both a saint to be worshipped and a woman to be desired. The boy, however, wishes to win her over by promising to bring her a gift from an oriental bazaar, Araby, which, to his young heart, is also an embodiment of ideal beauty and romantic grandeur. As the boy grows up, this bazaar gets emblematic for the intricacy and complexity of the adult world where the boy fails to navigate. He experiences a shattering epiphany at the end of the story. His childish fantasies are smashed by the bleak realities in Dublin and ultimately he develops a new viewpoint on life. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to show how a young boy is disillusioned with love and reality.

Keywords: Araby, Adolescence, Boy, Disillusionment, Epiphany, Love, Mangan’s Sister, Reality, James Joyce.