Discuss Joyce's "Araby" as a modern short story, including elements of modernism in your discussion.

With the effects of world wars and the Freudian movement along with Darwinism, the Romantic movement saw its end as Modernism came into being.  This movement is characterized with a marked pessimism in its examination of subject matter is much more mundane, With James Joyce's The Dubliners, from which "Araby" comes, there is concern with city life as a central force in society, with the individual often standing alone attempting

to preserve the autonomy of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. [sociologist Georg Simmel]

As a modern short story, then, Joyce's "Araby" places a boy in the impecunious environment of North Richmond Street in Dublin, Ireland, where the houses are brown.  Joyce himself referred to the brown brick houses as the "incarnation of Irish paralysis," a phrase he uses to characterize the powerlessness of the Irish to change their hopeless situations through individual action.

In "Araby," the young man is the narrator who romanticizes his infatuation with his friend's sister as he uses the exotic word araby to suggest the exciting world of romance.  He imagines further that at the market on Saturdays, he carries, not the groceries, but the holy grail for his fair maiden. 

The narrator's confusion with reality and truth is something that he brings on himself in the midst of the brown houses and even the girl's brown dress, which suggests that she is not what he imagines.  His pure thoughts of the grail are, in reality, sullied by his watching her and imagining the border of her slip as well his voyeurism as he peeks under the shade.  That his idealism is doomed to failure is further determined by the unconcern of the uncle and his flippancy after he returns too late for the narrator to get to the bazaar before it closes.  Then, when the boy reaches the bazaar, he realizes in his epiphany that he has been "a creature driven and derided by vanity."  Ashamed of his silly romantic ideas, the boy's eyes fill with tears in "anguish and anger." Trapped in his brown city life, the narrator feels the overwhelming pessimism and "paralysis" of his lonely existence.