The Dubliners of James Joyce - The symbol of the Church in Arabia Joyce's short story "Araby" is filled with symbolic images of a church. It opens and ends with strong symbols, and in the body of the story the images are shaped by the young), the Irish narrator's impressions of the effect the Church of Ireland has on the people Irish. The boy is fiercely determined to invest in someone within this Church the holiness that he believes should be the natural state of all within it, but a succession of experiences forces him to see that his determination is vain. At the story's climax, when he realizes that his dreams of holiness and love are incompatible with the real world, his anger and anguish are directed not at the Church, but at himself in as a “creature driven by vanity”. In addition to the images in the story that symbolize the Church and its effects on the people within it, there are descriptive words and phrases that add to this figurative meaning. The story opens with a description of the neighborhood in Dublin where the boy lives. Surprisingly evocative of a church, the image shows the ineffectiveness of the Church as a vital force in the lives of the neighborhood's residents, the faithful within the Church. North Richmond Street is made up of two rows of houses with "steady brown faces" (the benches) which lead to the tall "uninhabited house" (the empty altar). The boy's own house is located in a garden in the natural state of what would be like Paradise, since it contains a "central apple tree"; however, those who should have cared for it have allowed it to become desolate, and the central tree stands alone amid "a few scattered bushes" at dusk. the boy and his companions... middle of paper ... like Mangan's sister - his words are trivial and worldly. In a sudden flash of insight, the boy sees that his faith and passion have been blind. sees in the “two men counting money on a tray” a symbol of the money lenders in the temple. He drops the pennies into his pocket. The lights in the room go out and tears fill it. eyes as he sees himself as a "creature motivated and ridiculed by vanity", whose "foolish blood" has made him see profane desires as symbols of true faith. In this moment of disillusionment, he feels that he himself is responsible for having been so perplexed by his ideals that he has failed completely to see the world as it is. He discovered in his Church and in love (two traditional symbols of an ineffably sacred beauty) only a bad imitation of true beauty. Naturally, his disillusionment causes him "anguish and anger ».."