Araby as a story seems to be a little too Romantic in spirit to be a Modernist text. But with deeper examination what we realize its deep-rooted critique of the Romantic notion of love. Jacques Lacan had defined love as "giving something that you do not have to someone who does not even want it". The boy wants to give a gift bought from Araby. The girl had never demanded it from him and he does not even want it.
The radical conflation of the sacred and the sexual is another Modernist element in the story. Mangan's Sister is both a chalice and an object of beauty, arousing a moment of impregnatory orgasm and that too in the dead pries's back drawing room.
The story is definitely concerned with loneliness in the city---a squalid and drab cityscape, typical of Modernist literature e.g. Ulysses or Eliot's Waste Land.
The proto-stream of consciousness style, the emphasis on internal rather than external action, the epiphanic realization of a disillusionment about the Romantic and Oriental fantasy of Araby.
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