1、The symbolic meaning of the priest in ArabyIn the novel Araby, James Joyce used large amounts of symbolic imageries to create a typical setting, help the plots develop and indicate the heros characteristics. By analyzing the symbols in Araby, we can have a deep insight into the story and know the ma
2、in theme in Dubliners better. I mainly choose the priest as an example to analyze.At the beginning, we know that a priest had been a tenant of the boys home. “He had been a very charitable priest”, and he “had left all his money to the institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister”. So i
3、n this way, the priest symbolizes a good citizen of Dublin. However, the priest had gone, just like his “rusty bicycle-pump”, deserted and forgotten by other Dubliners. If all the good citizens had all gone away, how could Dublin be a good city? So the priest is also a symbol of the vital past, a co
4、ntrast to the “blind” and paralyzed present. It tells us that the freedom of the Ireland has gone and people then had no passion for a bright future. Besides, from the names of the books that “I” found, The Abbot, The Devout Communicant and The Memoirs of Vidocq, of which one is about religion and t
5、he other two are about exploration, we can see that the priest was also an imaginative person. So he had given his life to both piety and flights of imaginations, which symbolizes the conflict between belief and truth. Whats more, these three books also reflect the theme of the whole story on the bo
6、y. In The Abbot, there appear such words as romantic, religious and sexual, which is the center of the story. The boy wished for love as holy and pure as religion, but was confused because of the impact of material desires and soul desires. The Devout Communicant might cause the boy to suppress his
7、inner-world desires. As a result, he might regard the girl as noble saint and his affection would rise to the height of religion. No doubt, the religious book had influenced the boys adolescent attitude towards girls. The Memoirs of Vidocq reveals the theme of deception and betrayal. This implies th
8、at the boys innocent fancy and dream are just self-deception and are doomed to be destroyed by the truth. Whats more, the priest also symbolizes religion belief because of his special status. From the analysis before, we know that the priest was a man full of imagination. But in fact, a priest shoul
9、d be conventional. So this imaginative priest indicates Joyces doubt of the belief of Catholicism. Joyce hates Rome Catholic Church represented by the priest, which is suffocating quiet. The use of “set the boys free” describes the situation of Christian brothers leaving school, which not only conta
10、ins the meaning of release, but also implies that the Roman Catholic Church is a cage, in which people lived a rigid, immutable and frozen life like prisoners. This also implies that the whole Ireland was shrouded in the shadow of paralysis. The oppressive church trapped people in the cage so that people lived only in the dark, with no exit and no method for relief.
