James Joyce's "Araby" In James Joyce's short story "Araby," several different micro-cosms are evident. The story demonstrates adolescence, maturity, and public life in Dublin at that time. As the reader, you learn how this city has grown to destroy this young boy's life and hopes, and create the person that he is as a narrator. In "Araby," the "mature narrator and not the naive boy is the story's protagonist."(Coulthard) Throughout the story this is easily shown, especially when it refers to "the hour when the Christian Brothers' school set the boys free."(Joyce 2112) Although they were freed, they were placed into an "equally grim wor