Setting in James Joyce's Arabia In the opening paragraphs of James Joyce's short story, "Araby", the setting is the focus of the narrator's attention. Joyce carefully attends to exquisite details in personifying his setting, so that the narrator's emotions can be enhanced. To create a genuine sense of mood and reality, Joyce uses many techniques such as first-person narration, prose style, imagery, and especially setting. The setting of a story is vital to character development. In the opening paragraph, North Richmond Street is introduced as "blind" and "quiet," but another unoccupied house sits on it. The narrator states that the house is "detached" from the others on the street, but that "the other houses on the street, aware of a dignified life within them, looked at each other with unperturbed brown faces" (379). This creates an image of isolation and uncertainty for the only unoccupied house. The image of the solitary house lies in the shadow of the crowd of other houses that stand so extraordinarily calm and collected. This enhances the image of the adolescent narrator and perhaps foreshadows his blind inclination towards self-discovery on the road of life. The image also evokes the uncomfortable effect that a group of peers can have on an isolated adolescent. Will constant doses of rejection and alienation lead the narrator towards darker days to come? He lives with his aunt and uncle and there is no mention of his real parents. Whether he was abandoned, unwanted or orphaned remains a mystery. Indeed, it may be that the narrator simply has no outlet through which to exercise his fragile emotions and thoughts. He has friends, but none with a certain degree of intimacy, his playful innocence is linked... at the center of the paper... to the reader's perception, with the arrangement of physical aspects conveying a double meaning. The religiosity with which he experiences the fantasy of his childhood, briefly prefigured, has almost abandoned and betrayed him. He recognizes the “…silence as that which pervades a church after a service” (382). The bazaar has been emptied of all life within it and has become a cold and inhospitable environment. The narrator is once again left in his isolation in the middle of the bazaar, failed and dejected. He states, "Looking up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and mocked by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger" (383). Perhaps life itself is the religious experience worth living for, but one that evolves from the inner spirit of the self in a great moment of epiphany. Works Cited: Joyce, James. “Arabia”. Kirszner and Mandell 226.