Notes on

Eveline

• The story starts with Eveline’s looking out of the window and remembering her past; her memories are marked by the shift in time ( “One time”, l.5 -“Now”, l.18).

• the past was better than the present • her life is now unbearable • she has accepted to go away from her house and country • she is weighing the pros and cons of going and staying

• The passage is told from Eveline’s point of view by a third-person narrator who tends to disappear through he use of

indirect thought

into Eveline ’s

interior

monologue*

• As the narrator goes into Eveline’s mind the language changes, becomes more her own (simpler, more colloquial; free indirect speech, banal clichés of the reader of sentimental literature, melodrama)

Interior monologue

William James, Principles of Psychology (1890) Consciousness “ does not appear to itself chopped up in bits… (but) flows like a river or a stream. Hence let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness ”

Stream-of-consciousness fiction is concerned with the area which is normally beyond communication:  what the mental process is started by and what it consists of (memories, dreams, impressions, sensations, intuitions)  how it works (symbols, association of ideas, juxtaposition of images)

interior monologue: the literary instrument used to translate that phenomenon into words Dorothy Richardson was a pioneer in the technique, which was then fully developed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

two main types:

-



indirect interior monologue

introduced by such clauses as he thought, he

decided, she understood, she realized

third-person narrator

-

rational links for the association of ideas

-

external ordering mind even if the perspective is internal (some critics call this “ interior monologue ” )



direct interior monologue -

in first person

-

sudden shifts from thought to thought no apparent connection no evident intervention of the ordering mind of a narrator

-

direct access to the mind of the character (some critics call this “ stream of consciousness ” )

• why is she going to leave?

• her thoughts shift from present to past and to future present situation (father) conditioned by the past (mother) “Derevaun Seraun”.= the end of pleasure is pain?

EPIPHANY “Escape. She must escape” future expectations → Frank. Who is he?

• a sailor planning to move to Buenos Aires and take Eveline with him • he has told Eveline he intends to marry her • but Frank is a mysterious character; some implication that his intentions are devious: started his sailing career on a trade route associated with exile "going to Buenos Aires" was a slang term for prostitution the night boat to Liverpool may have been a reference to the mythological journey over the Styx river to the pagan underworld

Frank might have no intention of marrying his lover, but instead is planning to bring her into a situation she will find immoral

Why doesn ’t she go at the end?

• sense of duty • promise to her mother • affection for her father • masochism?

• fear of the unknown • she interprets her future in terms of her past (she ’s never been loved, why should she be loved now?) • spiritual paralysis

• great attention to

sounds

and to the

use of verbs

(tenses, stative or dynamic) • a mixture of

realism

and

symbolism

dust, broken harmonium, portrait of the priest, faraway countries, the sea, the ship

• Eveline’s final renunciation: an example of Dublin ’s paralysing effect on its inhabitants a vivid, realistic, moving story written in simple, effective language, appropriate to the character