"Eveline"  from James Joyce's Dubliners

"Eveline"  is a short story taken from the Irish writer James Joyce's work Dubliners, published in 1914. It is a collection of 15 stories which represent the city of Dublin and its inhabitants at the beginning of the 20^th century. They can be organized into four parts: the first one coincides with the first three short stories (The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby), which are narrated by a first person narrator and tell about childhood; the second one(Eveline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House), telling about adolescence; the third one contains the following four short stories (A Little Cloud, Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case), which are narrated by a third person narrator and  talk about maturity; the last one consists of the last three short stories (Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace), concerning with public life and linked to the longest story in the collection: The Dead.

Right from the title, the reader may expect the text to be about a woman, whose name is Eveline and whose life may be told.

Summing up the content of the text, a girl sits at the window of her home, waiting to leave Dublin. She focuses her attention on the aspects of her life that are driving her away. Her mother has died like her brother Ernest. What's more, she has fallen in love with a sailor, Frank, who has promised to take her to Buenos Aires. The possibility to have a new life and become a respectable woman really excites and makes happy Eveline.  Before leaving, however, she hears an organ grinder, recalling her the melody played on the day of her mother's death and therefore her promise to look after the home. Finally, at the port where she and her lover are waiting to embark on a ship to Buenos Aires, Eveline is conflicted( "out of a maze of distress") and therefore decides not to escape with Frank.

Considering  the analysis of the text into depth, the intelligent reader can easily notice that the story can be divided into two macrosequences, considering the change of setting: the first one concerns with the inside setting and Eveline's emotional crisis, because she is not able to realize whether it is better to remain in Dublin and take care of the family or to go away with her lover Frank for Buenos Aires and begin a new life, the second one takes place in the outside world, precisely at the port where Eveline will finally decide not to leave with her lover Frank, so the refuse of starting an entire new life. At this point, you can draw a simple difference between "The Dead" and "Eveline", because in the first one all the story develops into inside spaces, whereas in the second one the shift from inside to outside spaces occurs.

Going on, the reader comes across a text where time shifts are very frequent. Indeed the story starts with Eveline thinking about her childhood in Dublin( "one time there used to be a field"), with particular reference to her mothers' death; meanwhile, the record of the past is directly connected to her future expectations, that is the image of how her life will be after arriving in Buenos Aires with her lover Frank ( she was about to explore another life with Frank"). It follows that past and future determine what Eveline is in the present. In a way, the echo of the theory of the "stream of consciousness" by the French philosopher Henry Bergson comes to the surface. It stated that people are simply the result of their past experiences and future expectation. Eveline, like other human beings, is at the center of them and at the end she let her past win to her possible future. In other words, she demonstrates not to be able to defeat the state of spiritual and social paralysis that characterized all the Dubliners. It goes without saying that paralysis is strictly connected to monotony: Eveline's life will about repeat in the same way, like the annual dance and dinner party held by the Morkan sisters in "The Dead".

Let us focus our attention on the kind of narrator and the use of narrative techniques by Joyce. First of all, there is a third hidden omniscient narrator, who clearly knows the feelings of the various character of the story and also the settings in which the story takes place. There are few lines in which you can see the use of the free direct speech. Focusing on the narrative techniques, Joyce uses the inner monologue and the stream of consciousness in which he mixes various languages,  in order to put into a better focus feelings and thoughts lived by the main character Eveline. Therefore the use of such rhetorical devices makes the reader understand why there are a lot of time shifts within the story.

Interesting is to carry out Eveline's characterization built up by Joyce. The first piece of information that the reader encounters is that she is a reflective person, more interested in the "mind world" rather than the real world, and is nostalgic about the past. Meanwhile, she is in the position of a weak woman, completely overpowered by her brutal but sometimes nice father, with the only objective to keep clean the house and also earn money for the surviving of the entire family. So you see that Eveline has effectively become the housewife after her mother's death, but also the "family father". Besides, she does a poor job, and she is often treatened bad by her employer Miss Gavan.

Taking into consideration the last part of the story, we know that Eveline refuses to escape with Frank to Buenos Aires,to maintain the  promise made to her mother( "her promise to keep the home together as long as she could"). In this case the protagonist has lived what Joyce defined the epiphany, a term deriving from the Greek word "epiphainein" ( meaning to manifest), that is a short moment in which a character becomes aware of some aspects of life. Eveline suddenly realizes that the possibility of  a new life scares her, so she prefers remaining in Dublin and maintaining the promise made to her mother.