The story, “Araby,” is a story of the loss of innocence a young boy experiences at the end of the story. The nameless boy lives in a fantasy world he has built in his mind. In this world, that seems to be an escape from the oppressive reality. He has a drunk uncle. The uncle came home late and it suggest that he is, at least, not behaving as one would normally, “…talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat.” (574). The boy takes brief notice, “I could interpret these signs,” (574). It suggests that it is not the first occurrence of the man talking to himself or being clumsy and the boy knows that, but glosses over it quickly. It shows that the boy is beginning to interpret signs correctly but has yet to truly understand the real world around him. The true beginning point for this change is the crush he develops on a girl.A change starts to develop after this encounter, which leads to the resulting loss.This infatuation for the unnamed girl leads to allowing himself to be consumed by this lust. She is but a stranger to him; “I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not…” (573). Yet, he has imagined her as something that is worth devotion. His feelings for the young girl are shielding him from the joyless life of where he lives. It gives him this sense of being separate from all those around him.When the boy and girl finally talk, the bazaar is brought up. The boy sees this as his opportunity to show how he feels for her, or at least this image of her he has. The girl mentions that she would love to go, and he immediately believes that the Araby is some sort of exotic thing. He even goes so far as to let this vision of the Araby to “cast an Eastern enchantment,” (573) over himself. This lends to the illusion that the bazaar will be akin to some sort of a bright and bustling Middle Eastern market, or so he thinks. The same fantasizing that happened with the vision of the girl is happening with the vision of the bazaar. It is another cloud added to the reality around him. He has attached everything on this hope of going to the bazaar to buy an item for the girl just like he told her would because she could not make it to the Araby. It allows him to continue this blissful ignorance to the mundane world and he now has a purpose. Now, this new obsession gives him an excuse for his responsibilities to be skirted.The events leading to the epiphany the boy has is foreshadowing. The boy’s aunt said, “I’m afraid you may put off your bazaar,” (574) is just the beginning. His uncle’s late arrival home does not bode well. Then the uncle had forgotten about giving him money. Nor does the third-class seating on the train as well. There was the “intolerable delay,” (575) before the train left the station. He makes a rash decision to pay a shilling out of fear that he wouldn’t a sixpenny before the bazaar closed as there was “ten minutes to ten,” (575) in which causes him to not have enough money to actually buy something. When he enters most of the stalls are closed and it was mostly dark. He begins to forget why he came. The bazaar is not how he imagined it would be at all. He eavesdrops on the flirty conversation of three young people, which harkens back to the similar talk that he had with the girl he loves. The young woman at the stall appears to speak to him “out of a sense of duty,” (575) and he begins to realize that he has been fooled by himself. He reaches the epiphany that he is a “creature driven by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger,” (575). The narrator has awakened to the fact that all that he held was just the result of self-grandeur and delusions. He really had no chance with the girl and that she was just disinterested in him as the young girl at the stall was. Her fiddling with silver bracelet was disinterest in the conversation just like the woman was showing when the two young men were flirting with her. He must now face that he has a tedious life. That it is not all he made it up to be.In the beginning, the narrator is an immature and naive boy who is allowing his fantasies to lead him. He was not afraid of believing in fantasies because he did not think about any consequences. His ego and self-deception defeat him in the end. The bazaar was essential. It forced him to live in reality. The boy then sees himself as how some may have seen him the whole time. He is no longer the same person he was when the story started. This journey to go to the bazaar and buy a gift for the girl he liked changed his world drastically. He chased a fantasy that he wholeheartedly believed in and in the end it came to a grinding halt.