“Araby” is a short story by James Joyce about a boy who gets involved in a girl who lives at the corner of his street. The girl is known as the Mangan’s sister. She once asks him whether he has a plan to go to bazaar named Araby, as she will be away on a retreat and hence will be unable to attend. Araby is the fair organized by the church intended to raise money for the charity purposes. The boy finds a chance to impress the girl and promises her that he will bring something from Araby when he gets an opportunity to visit the place. After so much struggle, when he got the chance to go to the bazaar, its closing time arrived and the whole bazaar filled with darkness. Only a few stalls were still open in which he found nothing to buy for Mangan’s sister. Seeing this, the boy’s heart also filled with despair and darkness and eyes full of tears. His frustration causes him to cry. His late arrival to Araby was because his uncle arrived late at home, being drunk. He blamed himself for thinking and fantasizing too much about the girl and the bazaar known as Araby. The story depicts the reality or truth of life that how we get excited about something and keeps on fantasizing it unless the bitterness of life hits us bad and all our happiness changes into despair and imaginations and fantasies fade away. At that time or the moment, feelings of frustration fill our souls.
“The Ice Palace” is a short novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald regarding a girl named Sally Carrol Happer. Due to her passing age, she wants to get married. She is being advised by her young gentlemen friends about not getting married to a Yankee, but she gets interested in Harry Bellamy who resides in the North. Harry visits Sally, and she takes her to her one of the favorite places, the cemetery. Over the grave of Margery Lee, she gets emotional and considers her death heroic. In response to her emotionality, Harry supports her and hides his excitement about Sally’s upcoming visit to his house in the North. In that visit, Sally feels uncomfortable due to the extremely opposite weather and an unfamiliar way of life. Though Harry keeps on boasting her about his nation’s qualities, she remains uncomfortable.
At one dinner party, she meets a man named Roger Patton, but she still suffers from a constant tension. The story reaches its climax or the turning point when Sally and Harry visits an ice palace. There they talk about different things and discusses the structure and importance of the ice palace. At one point, they get separated, and all the lights go out. This makes Sally intensely terrified and makes her feel being in a foreign territory. After a few hours of panic and fear, she gets rescued by the man whom she met and conversed with at the dinner party, Roger Patton. When an in-depth fear and terror possesses her, she expresses her wish to go back to her home as early as possible. Being back to her residence, she feels relaxed and just as at the beginning of the tale, her friend invites her for swimming, the same happens at the end of the story. The story “Ice Palace” gives a contrast between the life of North and that of South. It depicts how some people cannot adapt to the changing environments, and going to the place where they came from becomes their only source of survival.
Comparison of the stories
Both the stories, “Araby” and “The Ice Palace” starts from a description of a street and a house respectively. Araby begins as, “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street” (Joyce, 1935, pp.1) while “The Ice Palace” starts as, “The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar” (Fitzgerald, 2016, pp.1). The titles of the stories indicate the significance of a bazaar and an ice palace respectively where the two stories reach their climax. The end of the “Araby” occurs in the same place as the title, but it isn’t true for the other story. “The Ice Palace” doesn’t end in the palace, rather it ends Sally going swimming with her friends. Both the stories are written in an adult language and in a description form. Adult and mature language in a sense that how the author describes his experience of the youth and that of the Araby market. “…where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens” (Joyce, 1935, pp.1).
The maturity of the author can be seen in his story “The Ice Palace” as, “She approached a mirror, regarded her expression with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed corn-colored hair with a rose littered sun bonnet” (Fitzgerald, 2016, pp.1). Thus, the style of both the stories is mature and relatable. Going deep into the content of the stories, one can notice how the stories are related and can be compared with each other. In the story “Araby,” the boy’s heart gets filled with despair, sadness, and anger in the darkness of the market where he went with a wish to get something for Mangan’s sister. This darkness is almost the same as the one in “The Ice Palace” which filled Sally’s heart with panic and fear and completely convinced her to go back to where she came from. Just like the boy feels frustrated on not being able to come to the market earlier, Sally feels frustrated on her decision of coming to the North. Just as she desperately wanted to go back to her home in the South, the boy wanted to come back from the fantasy world he’s been living in. Sally got rescued by Roger Patton from the darkness, but there was no one to rescue the boy from the darkness of the Araby market and his lost hopes.
Both the stories have romance as a central theme, and can be seen in the lines such as “When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped” (Joyce, 1935, pp.1) and “Where you are is home for me, Harry” (Fitzgerald, 2016, pp.5). However, both didn’t have anything like a happy ending to their love story. The boy cried in frustration for not getting anything for Mangan’s sister while Sally couldn’t stay in the North with Harry. But the way both stories ended was different. “Araby” ended with despair and unhappiness “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger” (Joyce, 1935, pp.5). But “The Ice Palace” had a casual end like the way it began. Asked by Carol, Sally’s friend, for swimming, she replied, “Hate to move, but I reckon so” (Fitzgerald, 2016, pp.11). One more difference noticeable in the stories is in the tale “Araby” the girl hasn’t been shown to love the boy, but Harry and Sally both were involved in each other in “The Ice Palace.” “She doesn’t love Harry – she loves her dream and her idea of marrying him,” says by Miss Jane (groupa.ucoz.co.uk). Hence, both the stories depicted same as well as the different aspects of life in their own unique ways.
Works Cited
English Community for Students – The Ice Palace, groupa.ucoz.co.uk/index/the_ice_palace/0-141.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. The Ice Palace. eKitap Projesi (PublishDrive), 2016.
Joyce, James, et al. Araby. Triestina Carlo Moscheni, 1935.
McManus, Dermot. “Araby by James Joyce.” The Sitting Bee, 29 May 2014, sittingbee.com/araby-james-joyce/.
