"Eveline" is a short story belongs to James Joyce's "Dubliners".
The title conveys to the name of the protagonist: a young woman who is nineteen years old. The extract conveys the girl's problems; she represents the typical dubliner who lives in the first decades of the 20th century. The story is arranged in three parts: the first one introduces the situation, in the second one there is a mixture of Eveline's thoughts about the past, present and the future, while the last one conveys to the paralysis of the character. Is a dramatic conclusion because the girl, at the station with Frank, doesn't move.
Probably, as a consequence of her mother's death and his fathers' brutal behaviour, she is very insicure. She states in her house that is her protective place. You can see it just at the first line 'She sat at the window'.
In the first line a third person omniscient narrator the setting of the first part: she is in her house, setting near the window, seeing outside and hearing the street's noise.
The narrator knows her emotions and thoughts because he speaks from Eveline point of view. The technique used by James Joyce calls 'stream of consciousness": the reader is, in this way, directly in contact with the protagonist conscience. The others people are described from her point of view. Is father is a drinker and violent man, instead Frank, her boyfriend, represents an escape for she. He is a sailor and is the opposite of she. He is a dynamic person instead she is a static one. In reality she wants to go away, but she can't. In the last scene, in the station at the North Wall, Eveline can't follows his boyfriend, who is leaving, on the boat, directed to Buenos Aires. The reader can perceives, in Eveline, a sense of suffocation; but it is a typical aspect of James Joyce's Dubliners.