He grew up in the undertow of a dying city and became an individual sensitive to the fact that the vibrancy of his city had receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residues of empty pity and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and for the man who no longer exists. Although the boy cannot fully understand it on an intellectual level, he feels that his surroundings have become deformed and ostentatious. At first he is as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by tempering his inattention with an unconscious rejection of his community's spiritual stagnation. After hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as "a creature driven and mocked by vanity", a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, intrinsically, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is no longer the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream despite the unpleasant and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the only sense of life disintegrating. In the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this