TITLE

The title of the short story is “Eveline”. The reader can suppose the text to be about a woman called Eveline. The name means “affable”, so the character could probably present some inherent or antithetical features in respect of her name.

DENOTATIVE ANALYSIS

From the denotative point of view, the short story tells about a 19 years old girl living in the suburbs of Dublin. She’s a shop assistant and belongs to the working class. She lives in a dusty house with her father and her elder brother, while her mother and her brother are dead. She lives an hard life and she doesn’t go on well with her father, so she’s looking for a change.

She has the occasion to start a new life when her boyfriend, Frank, a sailor, proposes her to reach Buenos Aires with him. At the end of the story, indecision paralyzes Eveline on the bank and she isn’t able to leave with Frank.

CONNOTATIVE ANALYSIS: prove the following statement: “The lack of the point of view is the ruling principle of Eveline’s paralysis”

The more evident textual clue of Eveline’s indecision is her wondering to her past and present life, rendered through the technique of the interior monologue: in her inability to state a judgement, she turns in her mind even the more negative aspects of her life to positive. Her fears for change makes Eveline operate a sort of abstraction that puts her life in a better light: “It was a hard (…) life, but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable one”; the girl is totally unable even to express a judgement on her own condition. A different kind of abstraction is present on her thoughts about her future life: she imagines it like a sort of utopia, something not real: she never really thinks to it as something possible. Besides, she thinks much more to her past than to her future. Other any expressions as “What would they say at the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow?” demonstrate Eveline’s strong attachment to her present, together with her fear for novelty and inability to think of something different from her environment.

The first image of the short story portraits Eveline watching out of the window, the evening ”invading” the avenue: through the narrative technique of showing, the third person narrator communicates the girl’s passive behaviour.

The narrator also adopts the language of sense impression to connote Eveline’s condition of indecision: the grey dust in her sitting room, the yellowing photographs, the brown houses and the cinder path remind at something nebulous, not definite, and symbolize the girl’s passiveness.

So, unable to make a point of view, Eveline is unable to act and to take personally her decisions.