EVELINE ANALYSES

Right from the start the intelligent reader understands that the short story is about a female character because the title is the proper name “Eveline”.

Reading the short story the intelligent reader understands that the real setting is the main character’s mind and the reader has total access to her mind thanks to a third person narrator.

Furthermore the setting is also given by the time of  the day “evening” and also the place where the character is “sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue”.

The setting has not got an important role, for this reason it is only a backdrop against which the action takes place.

Furthermore the short story does not follow a chronological line but it is created shifting from the present to the past during the whole story.

The story was written in 1914 and this time period affects the language but much more the social circumstances because the main character speaks about her familiar situation and the intelligent reader realises that the situation was a different one then ours.

The main character is Eveline, a nineteen-year-old girl and she is characterized by the way she thinks and by her memories. The main character is a static one indeed, she is the symbol of paralysis. She is a believable character because she thinks about her personal problems and she describes all particularly.

The most important event is that she wants to leave her home and go away with her boyfriend Frank and she does not know if it is the right decision.

The plot is believable because the scenes are particularly described and they seemed to be realistic because the main character’s thoughts are thoughts of everyone.

The narrator is a third person narrator so not the main character but it is an “all-knowing” third person narrator because he/she knows all about the main character and for this reason the reader has the feeling to be inside the character’s mind.

Furthermore in the story is present the stream of consciousness and it is given voice through the interior monologue.

The conflict of the story is if she should leave her home and go away or if she should not, it is an internal conflict within the character.

The turning point of the story is at the end because Eveline decides that she should go away with Frank but then she does not go.

The language used by the author is full of verbs of sense and the reason is to add a sense of reality to what he/she is telling us about the character and the events.