North Richmond Street Essay Example for Free

North Richmond Street Essay The combination of emotions of loneliness, love, and the human condition of isolation will be the bridge by which the works, Araby by Joyce, Digging by Heaney, and The Stronger by Strindberg will be examined. Joyce’s story sets the reader up for a fantastical journey taking place at North Richmond Street. In Joyce’s personal style that mixes despondency and blindness. The story is set up to be themed after isolation, and the reader gets a sense of being ostracized. Joyce creates the scene by allowing the setting to have its own characterizations: such as the street being a blind street, the house being at the ‘blind end’. Even the two houses which Joyce disturbing includes in his personification seem conscious of their surroundings, so that the reader becomes fully aware of how eerily set is the landscape. Mangan’s sister is the obsession by which the narrator defines his daily routine. The description of this obsession allows the reader to forgo the likening to a sweetheart and delve into the less traveled trenches of a young boy’s heart and strike straight to love. The story however remains brilliant in its fantastical descriptions of the town, with violet skies, and the impatience of some of the characters. The ostracized nature of the story then becomes one of unrequited love which in its way begets loneliness, which is what troubles, and excites, the narrator, as Joyce writes, â€Å"†¦yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. † It is in this power of speech which the narrator becomes entrapped. His lack of gumption defines his loneliness and yet he remains constant through his passion for her. Then, the conversation of going to Araby lights up the narrator’s life. It seems that the best and well thought out theme of the story is that of awe: awe of the girl he loves, and then awe of Araby, as Joyce writes, â€Å"I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. † However, this awe is short lived, and Joyce transports the reader back into that initial state of despondency and weariness of the human heart, as he writes, â€Å"Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger† and it is with this anger caused by lost determination, and love, that pervades the essence of the story. Along a similar vein, Seamus Heaney suggests in his poem Digging a slightly more cerebrally active loneliness. The danger in this poem becomes apparent in the first stanza in which the narrator suggests how the â€Å"pen rests; as snug as a gun†, which permits the reader to imagine a theme in the poem equivalent to Joyce’s isolation in Araby. The second stanza reveals an even more macabre scene in which the father of the poem is digging a grave: although the grave at this point may not be a literal grave but perhaps a grave built from years of a job digging potatoes, the essence of a son witnessing a father dig his own grave as it were suggests, not empathy for the parent but rather a gloomy sense of expectancy from the son. This expectancy allows the speaker to put the idea forth to the reader that acceptance of death can be met with anger and cynicism. This cynicism is highlighted by Heaney when he writes, â€Å"By God, the old man could handle a spade† and furthermore, â€Å"Just like his old man. † which tells the reader the speaker is seeing his own future played out from previous generations. Although hesitancy and awe are a bit twisted in this work of literature, the elements from Araby still remain the same; that of a mounting disparagement, in not gaining the things the speaker’s want and the feeling that they’ve met their limit and they fell short. In other words, both works created a world in which the main character in control of their fate was the lack of something: hope. There is no hope in either work; its essence is bashed away, especially in Heaney’s lines, â€Å"But I`ve no spade to follow men like them†. In the end of both stories, the theme of cynicism becomes apparent. The Stronger by August Strindberg is a play in which identity is the focus, and the human emotions which allow the characters to learn, advance, or perhaps share their life story, is trickled through to the reader through irony, and poor circumstances. The play begins with Frau X complaining about the other being alone on Christmas. Here the reader again is witness to the theme of isolation. Although in Araby the isolation was from the self’s inability to act in an emotional state, and in Heaney’s work the isolation was from breaking the tradition of digging, the speaker’s heritage passed from father to son, and ending in a grave, the isolation in The Stronger is one in which isolation is a choice. It is difficult at times to worry into the character’s psyche without knowing a background story of cause and effect but in The Stronger the feeling of choice in any given moment pervades the pages so strongly that the reader is left only with a feeling that the character’s purpose in wanting to be alone can only be given without a sense of despondency. It is with Frau X’s determination in becoming an identity outside of the personality of Mlle Y that best describes the climax of the play. There is action in this play as with the previous stories which suggest character development, whether or not it’s in a positive or negative way; it is progression in the character. Although love was an underscoring element in each story it is with the element of loneliness, and fear which allow each character to develop into themselves, and reveal their inner self to the reader that remains with the reader after the stories are told. In Joyce’s story the boy loves, but cannot act upon that love, being stultified by his emotional state, and driven into a type of fear of speaking, even to the woman who would have sold him a vase for his girl. In Heaney’s poem, the idea of escaping from a history of digging is troublesome, and yet he makes a choice to severe the bonds which could call him to the fate of his father, and father’s father. In The Stronger it is clear to the reader that choice is the main theme of the play; choice to become ones own person and not give into the demands of the other characters. Work Cited Portable Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. 6th Edition. Maryland: Kirszner and Mandell Publishing Co. , Thomson Wordsworth, 2007.