Juxtaposition In Eveline

“I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump out of my skin. I’ll shake the sky like a hundred violins” (60). In the story “The House on Mango Street”, the author Sandra Cisneros uses sentences full of imagery, metaphors, and word games, to show how self definition is a result of the people and places surrounding you. This is represented throughout the book when Esperanza wants to change her name, living in a male dominated society, and when she wishes for a new home.

As Edna undergoes an evolutionary journey of transformation she examines the reality and fantasy of her life. This quote evidences her morbid conclusion that life is unfair and chaotic. Like a teenager, she is full of emotional highs and lows as she discovers that she has other choices she can make in her life and recklessly leaps into it; sacrificing motherhood and the sanctity of marriage with a failure that resonates the hopeless she feels life offers. Edna’s depiction was extremely indecisive and restless. She develops a resentment toward life as if it has rob her of some imaginary happiness.

When Joyce applies personification to the setting, he creates the mood of the story, and directs the reader to the double meanings found in the personified setting. As an example of mood, winter brings with it the connotation of impending gloom, as the narrator claims, "...the houses had grown sombre...the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns" (379). This idea of Winter casts itself as the mood, where the feeling of awkward introspection is predominant. The lamps like the people of Dublin, have grown weary of there own, during Ireland's own battle with identity. In the broader scope of Joyce's imagery for the short story, it may be said Ireland itself is like the adolescent struggling to find its way. Joyce's messages of "complacency" during the tremendous social and political upheaval are encapsulated in the stories like "Araby," that collectively represent the book "Dubliners."

James Joyce’s Dubliners is a compilation of many short stories put together to convey the problems in Ireland during that time. Many of his characters are searching for some kind of escape from Dublin, and this is a reoccurring theme throughout the stories. In the story “Little Cloud,” the main character, Little Chandler, feels the need for both an escape from Dublin and also from his normal everyday life. Gabriel, the main character in Joyce’s final story of the book, “The Dead,” desires a different form of escape than Little Chandler. He desires to escape his aunts’ party, and also at times, Dublin society. Although the stories

“Even together, people were as solitary as cows in a field chewing their own cud,” writes Wolff (123). This is an idea that seems to be deeply ingrained in Joyce’s consciousness, but does it represent how she truly feels deep down? Joyce seems to put on this facade of a strong self-reliant woman when, in reality, she relies more on her roommate Dina than she would care to admit. Throughout Tobias Wolff’s “Migraine,” Joyce insists on being independent; however, Dina’s leaving seemly causes her headaches, which can only be eased by the love and comfort that accompanies Dina’s touch. Joyce’s perceived independence fuels her idea that solitude will help the pain in her head subside.

All of these realizations about change are due to Eveline considering the biggest change in her life: the change she is most fearful about, moving away from Ireland to be with Frank in Buenos

Human beings yearn for better lives, often through escape. The main characters in James Joyce's Dubliners are no exception. Characters such as Eveline in "Eveline" and Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud" have a longing to break free of Dublin's entrapment and pursue their dreams. Nevertheless, these characters never seem to achieve a better state; rather, they are paralyzed and unable to embark on their journey of self-fulfillment. Joyce employs this motif of the empty promise of escape and its subsequent frustration through one's own responsibilities and purely physical acts. Through this, Joyce interconnects the different Dubliners stories to show that escaping life in a place as paralyzing as Dublin is no easy task on the individual.

Firstly, Joyce incorporates multiple figures of speech and elements of design to express a purpose through the events that occur in the story. As mentioned before, this story is written in first person perspective of a boy who lives with his aunt and uncle. The perspective best allows readers to understand what this boy encounters every day and his opinion on certain topics. Furthermore, it also allows readers to perceive the feelings this boy has for a girl. For example, the author mentions the boy playing and says, “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses…” (Joyce, 1). This quote highlights the lively and childish fun the boy has with his friends.

Eve runs away from school as she realises her role will be to produce babies for the new city. She slowly learns that men aren’t as bad as she was led to believe and ends up falling in love with the character, Caleb. “I had worked so hard at school, taken detailed notes on each lesson, scribbling down the margins until my fingers cramped. And for what? To fill my head with lies” (p. 142).

Authors often use literary techniques to convey a central theme in their writing. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners, James Joyce uses a multitude of literary techniques to communicate the ideas of escape and freedom. Joyce’s use of narrative perspective, selection of detail, and conventional diction in his short story “Eveline” allow him to express Eveline’s oppressive environment as well as her ultimate submissive nature to it.

Throughout James Joyce’s “Dubliners” there are four major themes that are all very connected these are regret, realization, self hatred and Moral paralysis, witch is represented with the actual physical paralysis of Father Flynn in “The Sisters”. In this paper I intend to explore the different paths and contours of these themes in the four stories where I think they are most prevalent ,and which I most enjoyed “Araby”, “Eveline”, “The Boarding House”, and “A Little Cloud”.

inability to escape their lives. In another of Joyce’s writings, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

“Derevuan Seraun” is an old Irish Gaelic, translating to “at the end of pleasure, there is pain” (Tigges 120). Significant because these are Eveline’s mother’s last words, it contributes as to why Eveline viewed her mother’s life as a “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” (Joyce 33). Many commenters argue that Joyce’s choice of adding “Derevaun Seraun” into the short story did not have purpose and was a smudging of Irish culture given the “improbability that a Dublin woman of this time and class would know Gaelic” (Suglia). However, Joyce purposely added the Irish Gaelic as a form of an allusion. Throughout Eveline,

Joyce was openly critical of Irish parochialism and he wrote "Eveline" to prove his belief that Ireland "does not permit the development of individuality," as the character Eveline is presented by Joyce to be the absolute epitome of Irish parochialism; rather than go after her ambition to leave Ireland for a better life, Eveline's life is lead by her sense of duty. We see this when Eveline doubts her ambitions, "In her home any way she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her," The simplistic reasoning that Joyce uses conveys the absolute autonomy of Eveline's life as her only reasons to not chase her ambition are basic requirements for most people's lives. Eveline, unfortunately, leads the stereotypical life for a woman in Ireland around that time as her life was ruled by her sense of duty and the men in her life rather than by her ambitions and herself. The reason Joyce did this was so he could share the

In James Joyce’s “Eveline”, Eveline remains in Dublin to care for her father, to take care of the house and the kids, and she realized she was already comfortable in her current home. Eveline has lived in Dublin her whole life in Dublin and has seen her siblings either leave home or pass away through time. Yet she remains in the house that she grew up in, experienced the changes in environment, changes in time, and the change in the people around her. She has seen her mother pass away, her father grow older and crueler. She has witnessed the field “in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children” be destroyed by a man from Belfast who “bought the field and built houses in it – not like their little brown houses but