Eveline is a short story written by the Irish novelist James Joyce and it belongs to his collection of stories Dubliners and more specifically it is part of the section of adolescence. The purpose of the tale is convey the problems of a common girl who lives in Dublin during the first decades of the 20th century. The title refers to the name of the protagonist of this story: Eveline, a young woman of about nineteen years old.
Right from the first lines is presented, by a third person omniscient narrator, the setting of the first part of the story: she is in her house, sitting near the window looking outside and hearing the rumors of the street. The choice of the writer to use onomatopoeias ( "clacking" v. 6) and short sentences (for example: "she was tired" ,"few people", "everything changes") underline an artificial and researched use of language. In addition, more important in the text is the incessant shift from the passed time, the present and the future.
After the information about the setting, Eveline tells the reader something about her past, introducing in this way the concept of "time of memory" opposed to the chronological idea of time. Through the memory is underlined by the novelist the difference between present and past: the past is completely different from the present also because, as they brothers do, even Eveline is going to go away from Dublin and living her native house. Eveline's desire is to run away and the reader can understand her emotions and thoughts because is an omniscient narrator who speaks from Eveline's point of view, while the character is sitting near her house's window and looking around. This technique used by J. Joyce is called "stream of consciousness" through which the reader is directly in contact with the protagonist conscience.
Relevant in this text are the figure of her dead mother, her violent father and Frank, a young man with whom she has a relationship. Frank represents for Eveline the opportunity to escape from the "cage" she lives in. The last scene take place in the station at the North Wall where the novelist gives the imagine of Frank who is leaving and waiting to Eveline to depart with him. The action in all the story is quite restricted, reduced to the minimum. In it is presented a continual stasis, expressed even at the end of the text when Eveline instead of leave with Frank decided to remain in Ireland while the boy is on the boat directed to Buenos Aires. The stasis and at the same time the sense of suffocation is typical of Joyce's Dubliners collection.