James Joyce's short story, "Araby," is about the difference between expectation and discovery. It tells the story of an adolescent's crush on a neighbor's older sister, and how that crush ultimately leads to heartbreak. Almost every sentence of the story symbolizes something. On the surface Araby is a simple tale of lost love and heartbreak. However, underlying is a story about a boy's total loss of religion.
             From the beginning of the story it becomes obvious to the reader that religion plays a major role. The first paragraph describes two rows of houses, staring at each other with "brown faces." There is an uninhabited two story house at the end of the row in a "square ground." All of this seems to symbolize a church setting; the houses symbolizing pews and the two story empty house symbolizing an empty altar. A priest died in the house that the narrator lives in, leaving behind some books and a rusty bike pump. The narrator liked the book The Memoirs of Vidoca the best because its pages were yellow, a sign that it had been read many times. According to Barnes and Noble, this book is about a scoundrel and a criminal. The priest read this criminal book more than The Devout Communicant, a religious book in his collection. This suggests that the priest was not devout and was in fact a scoundrel himself.
             The narrator is fixated on a playmate's sister who lives on his street. "Her image accompanied me in places the most hostile to romance." (173) This means that no matter where he was she was always on his mind. One night he went into the room where the priest had died and pressed his palms together as if to pray, saying "oh love! Oh love!" It is unclear whether the narrator is praying to God or Mangan's sister herself. He says that he never really spoke to her outside a few casual words, and yet "her name was like a summons to al...