Comparing James Joyces Araby and Ernest Hemingways A...

Comparing James Joyces Araby and Ernest Hemingways A Clean, Well-Lighted Place As divergent as James Joyces Araby and Ernest Hemingways A Clean, Well-Lighted Place are in style, they handle many of the same themes. Both stories explore hope, anguish, faith, and despair. While Araby depicts a youth being set up for his first great disappointment, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place shows two older men who have long ago settled for despair, both stories use a number of analogous symbols, and lap over each other thematically. At the beginning of Araby, the narrator describes the streets lamps as lifting their feeble lanterns towards an ever-changing violet sky (227). The colour violet is both dark and rich. The sky,†¦show more content†¦It shows what there is. It does not search for what there might be. The old man sits in the shadow and looks down. Joyces character carries a chalice of faith through a maelstrom of mundane chatter (228). Hemingways sips a glass of brandy. To him, the mundane is not a distraction on the way to higher awareness, it is all there is. If one does not like it, one may numb themselves to it, or one may quit it. This old man will not listen to myths of meaning and comfort. He has gone deaf, perhaps out of not wanting to hear any more empty promises or stories that fail to hold up. Joyces boy has had his first crushing disappointment. Hemingways old man has had his last. There is no more looking up for him. His drink, his regular cafà ©, these are his comfort and his ref uge. Both these male authors constitute woman as the Other, a counterpart and compliment to some man, metaphysically or physically. In Joyces story, Mangans sister is the goddess in service of whom our junior Hero goes on his quest to the bazaar. Once arrived, the young lady who flirts with the English boys comes to embody his sense of betrayal. He has come all this way, and no one has time for him. That he came all this way for a girl makes it ironic that it is a girl he first speaks to and she gives him a cold welcome. It may imply that the comfort one seeks in the Church is not always there when you need it, or even that it is never really there: that it is a sham and a front. The women