believes that buying her a gift will prove his feelings and make her see him as someone special This mission becomes his purpose and he dreams of it constantly Realization However his journey to the bazaar ends in disappointment He does not have any money His uncle from whom he wants to take some money comes home late from work The narrator arrives at the bazaar late He finds most of the stalls closed He realizes the market is not as fanciful as he imagined In the end he doesn t buy a gift and is left with an epiphany a moment of sudden and great revelation his quest was motivated more by vanity than love He reflects in anguish Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity In short through this failure the narrator begins to understand the painful gap between fantasy and reality