Abstract

    Araby, one of the most classic works in Dubliners by James Joyce, depicts the whole process from the adolescent obsessed with love till the pursuit of love lost in disillusionment. This paper mainly analyzes the use of contrast and conflict in terms of background, words and behaviour and mental activities and discusses their functions respectively in revealing the theme as well. The paper ends with the conclusion that the dark social reality results in the hero’s inner conflicts, his disillusionment of love and the final epiphany.

Key words:  Araby, contrast, epiphany, dark society

摘 要

   《阿拉比》是詹姆斯•乔伊斯的短篇小说集《都柏林人》中的经典之作，描绘了一位少年由沉迷于理想爱情到追求爱情的幻灭过程。本文从环境描写、人物语言和动作以及心理活动三方面展开对对比与冲突这一技巧的分析，显示出其在揭露主题所起的深刻作用。本文最后得出结论：小主人公由内心矛盾到爱情幻灭，再到最后的顿悟，一切都来源于黑暗的社会现实。

关键词：《阿拉比》；对比；顿悟；黑暗社会

1.    Introduction
There is no denying that James Joyce is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is best-known for his great works，Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which generations of readers make quite a lot of efforts to finish. Most readers tumble through his works characterized by stream of consciousness. Yet, it is generally agreed that one might as well start from Dubliners, the first collection of short stories by James Joyce, since Brenda Maddox1 puts it in the introduction of Dubliners that people "will find no plainer English” (vii). Plain as it is, you can never be too scrupulous when it comes to the theme of every story.
As for Dubliners, James Joyce has the famous saying: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal”(Milesi 4) . James Joyce depicts the life of different classes of people in Ireland. Unlike short stories by O.Henry, those by James Joyce in Dubliners seem as if they were disparate from each other but in fact act as a whole or a continuum. Only when we read them all can we recognize the deep-rooted theme as well as the delicate and carefully-chosen diction in every story. The book Dubliners, classified into different stages from a boy to a grown-up, mirrors the same paralyzed society from various angles. You can see the same dark society from the eyes of people from all walks of life.