The Adolescent Initiation Portrayed in Arabia"Araby" tells the story of an adolescent boy's initiation into adulthood. The story is narrated by a mature man reflecting on his adolescence and the events that forced him to face the disappointing realities of adulthood. Minor characters play a vital role in this initiation process. The boy observes adult hypocrisy in the priest and Mrs. Mercer; and his vain, self-centered uncle introduces him to another disappointing aspect of adulthood. The boy's infatuation with the girl ultimately ends in disillusionment, and Joyce uses the specific example of the boy's disillusionment with love as a metaphor for disillusionment with life itself. From the beginning the boy deludes himself about his relationship with Mangan's sister. In Araby, he realizes the parallel between his own self-delusion and the hypocrisy and vanity of the adult world. From the beginning, the boy's infatuation with Mangan's sister takes him away from childhood and into adulthood. He severs ties with his childhood friends and wallows in his isolation. He can't think of anything other than his love for her: "From the window of the house I saw my companions playing down in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked at the house dark. where he lived." The cries of friends are weak and indistinct because they are distant emotionally as well as spatially. As a searching adult, he imagines carrying his love as if it were a sacred object, a chalice: "His image accompanied me even to places most hostile to romance... I imagined carrying my chalice safely through a crowd of enemies." Even in the active and distracting market... in the middle of the paper... if and who was someone else. His disillusionment with love then extends to life in general. Seeing the last rays of hope fading from the top floors of Arabia, the boy cries: "I saw myself as a creature driven and mocked by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Eventually he makes the connection: deluding himself, he was as hypocritical and vain as the adults in his life. Before these realizations he believed he was guided by something of value (such as the purity of love), but now he realizes that his search has been in vain because honesty, truth and purity are only infantile illusions and he will not be able to never return to the world. the innocence of childhood. Works Cited: Joyce, James. “Arabia”. The Norton Introduction to Literature, eighth shorter edition. Eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays. New York: WWNorton.