Eveline

The narrative style of “Eveline” reveals Joyce’s early experiments with representing the inner experiences of his characters; although the text is written in third-person perspective, the point of view is clearly Eveline’s. The story is driven by the whims of her reminiscences and observations, revealing the world through her eyes and with her commentary. The text does not read like Leopold Bloom’s or Stephen Daedalus’s thoughts in Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, but the narrative experience is similar, reading as stream of consciousness despite the distance of the third-person narration. By revealing Eveline’s thoughts as they happen, Joyce closes the distance between protagonist and reader, creating an early iteration of Modernist conceptions of “realism.” In 19th-century realist novels, the representation of reality was shaped by what was considered an objective perspective, representing people, landscapes, and events as they are. These novels used third-person perspective, and the drive for objective realism combined with third-person narration created the sense of an omniscient narrator. Modernists, especially after seeing the effects of rapid industrialism and social changes alongside the horrors of World War I, searched for alternate ways to represent a reality in which Victorian sensibilities no longer fit within the modern Western world’s social, technological, and political landscapes.