How old is the narrator of "Araby" when he tells the story?

We are not
told the exact age of the boy who narrates "," but the story indicates he is at the
cusp of a transition from boyhood to adolescence. He goes to school, he plays games with the
other boys in the streets until dark, and he is under the thumb of his aunt and uncle. He cannot
go to the bazaar called Araby if his uncle doesn't take him.

We know he is
more than just a little boy because of his awakening sexual desire, which he focuses on his
friend Mangan's older sister. As he puts it:

Her dress
swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side. 

He watches her from afar, and she becomes an idealized object of
his desire. She doesn't have a name that we are told, but he conflates her with the Virgin Mary,
symbol of motherhood and purity, and with the exotic bazaar Araby, symbolizing the mystery and
sexuality of the Orient. As he views her one day, the word "white" stands in for the
mixture of purity and sexuality she represents to him:

The
light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that
rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress
and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. 

When she speaks to him of the bazaar:

The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul
luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. 

Yet
like a young adolescent, his emotions are in turmoil, on a roller coaster ride, and quickly
crash into disillusion as the bazaarand thus the girldon't live up to his expectations. Like
many young adolescents, he is sorting out fantasy and reality as he gropes to come to self
understanding:

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as
a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.