The structure of James Joyce's "Araby" is tri-partite, beginning with the evocation of a childish experience of a dingy environment, followed by his romantic attachment to a girl, and ending with the visit to the Araby bazaar. In this story, the boy achieves a revelation that marks the end of childhood, and the shift to adolescence. The narrator is a boy from this school who seems to be remembering these days from some distance in time. He has reached the time of life when he is changing from child to adolescent and this is represented by his attraction to Mangan's sister, whose image stays with him.
The story opens with a description of North Richmond Street that evokes a paralytic image:
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hours when the Christian Brother' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces (69).
There seems to be no life and no change in this street except when the school lets out. For the boys, there is a moment of freedom as they pass from the religious school to the dingy and blind street. Escape is possible in that interim for those who can achieve it, but otherwise they shuttle between these two staid and decaying institutions. This is the point of view of the adult narrator looking back at his youth.
As noted, he is looking back to a time of change in his own life, and specifically to a moment of disillusionment. The tone of the story is rather bitter, and it is evident that the young man has grown to be an older man still stinging at the loss of his innocence and at the discovery of the falseness of the world and specifically of the society of Dublin:
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes b...