Eveline is a short story totally focused on the main character that is Eveline. According to the modernist trend the short story presents a little plot.
Right from the idea of the paralysis, which is the core of Joyce’s work, the reader can perceive it just considering Eveline: she is sat at the window looking at the evening. Looking at the outside in the protective shield of the window, she is stuck in the setting, which turns out to be a close setting.
J. Joyce uses the language of sense impression to have the reader to feel and hear directly what happens in the scene. In order to realize it, he uses onomatopoeic verbs such as “clacking”. In this way, the reader has the idea of being inside the scene. Such linguistic choice is useful to make the scene more realistic.
The character’s thoughts bring her back to the past; even if she is looking outside, she is not projected outside and in time forward. The narrator uses literary choices to make the scene realistic by having the reader perceive, not by description. The character thought bring her back to the past. The character is still in a closed space, she is afraid because of the outside. She is not projected outside, she is going back to the past. “One time there used to be”.
Collecting all the memories from the past, the reader perceives a sense of nostalgia; now she looks tired while once she used to play.
Eveline, despite her young age, is already dead, because she lives in memory. Death is much real than active life, as you can notice in Hamlet’s monologue: people are afraid to take actions. Eveline is symbolical, basically because she feels a sense of guilt. She just considers things that have already happen.
In the set of her memories there is a first reference to her father, who is presented as a violent and aggressive man because he drinks a lot. The idea of this aggressive father is anticipated by the verb “to hunt”. .
The reader can understand that she has brothers and now her father has become more violent than he used to be. (“Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago”)
However, she has fallen in love for a sailor named Frank who promises to take her with him to Buenos Aires. The idea of leaving her familiar place starts to develop now, but it is not an act, just an intention. Eveline is paralyzed since she is unable to react, therefore she looks as if she were dead. For all the story she is in potential to go and leave her house. However, what seems to paralyze her is her fear; she feels a sense of guilty because in her past experience she has promised her mother to look after her father. All her life is conditioned by such promise.
Her intention to move from her hometown will remain always an intention; it will never be translated into an action. She thinks that going away means leaving her familiar objects, that are reassuring objects which prevents her to be afraid “In her home anyway she had shelter and food”.
The showing technique in the last part is less filter by the narrator, She has not a point of view, even if the narrator tells the story from her perspective. Her mother and her father have decided for her and also Frank. Eveline and Frank are perfectly antithetical. In fact while the first one can't move (from her family and from her country.) and is perpetually a passive object of other's decisions, the second one is active, in continuous movement. He was from Dublin but he left it when he was very young to have an adventurous life, in fact it's significant that he worked as a sailors for many years. Frank represents the progress, while Eveline stilness. Eveline becomes in this story an example which helps the writer to show how Dublin is paralysed itself. In fact Joyce's Dubliners are confined by restrinctions of nationality, language and religion and the author hopes the birth of people like Frank, openminded and able to go away.

LBattistella