James Joyce’s “Araby” and John Updike’s “A&P” are short stories that introduce young men to love, attraction, and the long crude road to unhappiness. Joyce’s story focuses on a young boy, who is about to fall into the harsh world of sexual desires and attraction. The boy “falls in love” with Mangan’s sister, which leads him to go to Araby and bring something back for her because she is unable to go. While there, a young women who is engaged in a conversation with two other young men, does not fully acknowledge with respect the presence of the boy. From this he becomes angry, leaving the bazaar, his sense of love, and most importantly, his childhood. . Similarly, Updike’s story features another young man, who works as a cashier at a grocery store called A&P. His boyish sex sense begins to tingle, and he looses focus of his work to the explicit dressing of the three young girls. The three girls have come up from the beach to get a few snacks; they are dressed in their skimpy bathing suits and no shoes, with no care of what others are thinking of them. The cashier, Sammy, has come up with vivid personalities, lifestyles, and descriptions of the three girls, without even talking to them. Of course his entire mental picture is destroyed when the girl that seems to be in charge, which he has dubbed to be the “Queen”, speaks in a tone, which he did not imagine. It gets worse when the three girls are asked to leave by the manager, due to their inappropriate clothing. Angered, Sammy quits on the spot, in hopes that the girls will admire his selfless act and be appreciative, but by this time, the girls are gone, and few witnessed his noble act, and even less cared that he did. Joyce and Updike use setting and imagery to show that superficial attraction can lead to disappointment.
The use of setting is present in both stories, describing the physical descriptions of the communities of the characters, to show that shallow appeal carves the road leading straight to unhappiness. In “Araby”, Joyce describes the community as mostly aged and conventional; “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.” Updike does alike in his story “A&P”, when he also describes the society overlooked from the doors of the grocery store. “…And if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church…” But contrastingly, the communities are a bit different then one another. In “Araby” the place seems very calm, but there are still events that keep the people alive and well; as opposed to the town in “A&P”, in which, “It’s not as if we’re on the Cape, we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.” Both of these stories share the same sort of surrounding societies, which in turn have similar affects on the superficial feelings of the young male characters involved in the story.
Joyce and Updike each in their own ways use imagery to take the reader into the minds of these young boys, and again let the reader share the characters long walk down the very crude road of superficial love. Updike came into the story with imagery right of the bat. “In walk these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” The first thing the narrator notices is their lack of clothing; this could potentially be taken in a sexual and condescending context from the reader. Also, the reader is able to infer that the use of imagery, in the mind of the young clerk, would play a big role. On the contrary, in Joyce’s “Araby”, Joyce shows the superficial thoughts of the boy in a much nicer light. The boy describes Mangan’s sister’s hair as, “soft rope of her hair”. This showed that the boy actually held Mangan’s sister in high regard, and did not see women for their bodies. Again, whereas Sammy persisted on seeing only “…the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of her cloth there was a shinning rim…there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head, except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down…” The boys both had their own senses of seeing superficial love, but each did see it.
Through their imaginative utilizations of imagery and setting, in their own ways, Joyce and Updike portray the consequences of young people truly believing in their initial, superficial attractions. In both stories, the main characters refused to see past their initial attractions to the women in the stories; whether it was the limitation of the society they lived in, or being only able to examine the girls from afar [“A&P”]. Their inner thought were the only limitless way they could see the women as they wanted.
