A Low-Speed Connection - DE Book Club

Slow motion: in movies, this device is used to let the viewer enjoy every detail of the picture. In literature, the process is quite the opposite. By offering a more detailed description of the moment, the text gives the reader the impression that time moves at a slower pace. In Araby, James Joyce uses this literary tool in his depiction of the train ride to convey his character's impatience.

The narrator, who has been kept "late enough as it is", is very eager to get to the bazaar. The reader is meant to feel the same anxiety. What could have been told in a few words ("I took the train to the bazaar") is stretched into a paragraph of sixteen lines, describing rather dramatically what is, in fact, a mere fifty minute journey taking place between nine o'clock and ten minutes to ten. The train ride is depicted as a painfully long experience: "After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly."

However, the tension dissipates as the narrator approaches his goal. From the moment the bazaar is mentioned, time seems to move at a much quicker pace, and what began as an interminable journey suddenly becomes a matter of minutes:

"The porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised platform."

The train ride represents the final obstacle between the narrator and his ultimate goal, the Araby bazaar. As in many movies, slow motion is used to accentuate the tension of one last challenge. Whether or not our protagonist will succeed depends uniquely on the events of these final instants, or so we're led to believe. In the end, however, the true enemy isn't the train or time itself, but our narrator's own vanity.

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