Essay on Joyce’s portrayal of thought in Eveline - 1050 Words

Joyce’s portrayal of thought in â€Å"Eveline† Among the short stories in the collection Dubliners by James Joyce, â€Å"Eveline† is a story wherein the reader views the world through the eyes of the eponymous heroine. In delineating her contemplations, Joyce mainly uses the third person narrative with traces of free indirect discourse. The narration sequence at first glance appears to be highly disconnected. However, it is through the judicious use of both these devices that Joyce succeeds in portraying – with a great deal of realism – the progression of thought in the human mind. By using this peculiar mode of narration, Joyce makes us realize that, the process of thinking is not crisp and continuous after the fashion of a well-crafted†¦show more content†¦Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field...† [Underlining mine] (Joyce, 5-12). The underlined words indicate the main ideas in the sentences and one can readily observe that the ideas do not connect between consecutive sentences. Instead, they branch out and reconnect after a while (again through the judicious ‘scattering’ of key words and phrases) giving the (much sought-after) illusion of real human thought. By the use of this device, Joyce portrays the stream of thought as the stochastic process that it is. That the lines quoted above form a part of the protagonist’s reminiscences, is not explicitly stated anywhere in the text. For the most part, Joyce uses indirect speech to convey these thoughts, and this tends to take the focus away from the protagonist. However, the occasional use of the free indirect style brings the focus back to Eveline. For instance, the paragraph partly quoted above (5-12) is full of Eveline’s reminiscences indirect speech. However, we can identify the last sentence in that paragraph as an instance of free indirect discourse from the use of the temporal adverb ‘now’, which is out of place in pure indirect speech: â€Å"Now she was going to go away like the others, toShow MoreRelatedAnalysis of The Novel Dubliners by James Joyce Essay1605 Words   |  7 Pageslooking-glass is Joyces representation of Dublin, which functions akin to an external unconsciousness in that a series of unrelated characters experience similar problems by virtue of their common connection to the city. Furthermore, the characters absorb the city into their identities, creating a symbiotic relationship with it. This renders escape - or emigration - a bifurcation of ones identity, and thus, paralyses characters once a means of escape is revealed to them. Therefore, Joyces Dubliners areRead MoreLecture on Short Story5432 Words   |  22 Pagesartifice whose every part must work in unison towards achieving what he call ed unity or singleness of effect. This idea of perfect calibration is clear in these words: â€Å"A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents--he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect†Read MoreDiscuss Joyce’s Use of Free Indirect Discourse in ‘Counterparts and a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man1379 Words   |  6 PagesJames Joyce Discuss Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in Counterparts and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce utilises free indirect discourse to convey the sense of an individual processing the world around him in an idiosyncratically subjective way. In many of Joyce’s portraits, whether of his Dubliners or of his semi-autobiographical Stephen Dedalus, the narrative is confined by the limitations of the character’s state of mind; as the individual consciousness pervadesRead MoreEssay The Portrayal of Women in James Joyces Dubliners2594 Words   |  11 Pages In Dubliners, women are victims indeed. They are victims of home, of the recognized virtues by society, of classes of life, of religious doctrines, and of women themselves. In this essay, we are going to analyze the portrayal of women in Dubliners in terms of the aforementioned aspects, namely home, the recognized virtues by society, classes of life, religious doctrines and women themselves. The selection above is provided to make student aware of focus of the essay.   The complete essay begins