ANALYSIS OF EVELIVE BY JAMES JOYCE

Eveline is one of the most important short stories written by James Joyce in  The Dubliners . He uses  a third person omniscient narrator, who is in the mind of the character the writer tells the story of Eveline.  She is  a teenager who lives in Dublin and she doesn’t know what to do about her own life: leaving Dublin with her lover  Frank or staying at home with a violent father, but respecting her dead mother’s will.

About the structure of the novel you can observe that  Joyce at the beginning  of the story shows  Eveline’s thoughts while she’s at the window starring the street  and then  he puts the location  from the house to the dock from which Eveline is supposed to leave. The first section of the story happens  in Eveline’s house whereas  the second part is located   near the sea that separates the protagonist from her new life in Buenos Aires.  Eveline is represented like  a fragile character . Eveline was happy with her mother, but when she died  she immediately felt  her own life  as a shop worker with a violent father was meaningless. For this reason,  she wants to go away from Dublin and her old life in spite of the promise she did to her mother. But at the end  she can’t leave her home  giving up all  her dreams of a better life . This difficult choice of life of Eveline   reflects the conditions of many women in Dublin during the  20s, who had  to choose  between a domestic life or the possibility of a new marriage life abroad. You can’t know  if  Eveline is going to go back home, living with her dad, or if  she is going to live by herself. The message  of the story is to communicate  how huge and harmful inside conflicts of human beings can be. The end of the short story  shows how Eveline’s    wishes fail   and she feels a sensation of  guilty.   Eveline is conscious that she can’t have a lucky future.

Joyce uses simple sentences  throughout this story with the help of dialogues that make the narration more intense. He also goes back to the past, describing  Eveline’s  thoughts  while she is at the window.