Joyce’s portrayal of thought in Eveline Essay -- James Joyce Dubliners

Joyces portrayal of thought in EvelineAmong the terse stories in the collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Eveline is a storywherein the referee views the world through the eyes of the eponymous heroine. In delineatingher contemplations, Joyce mainly enforces the tierce person narrative with traces of free indirectdiscourse. The narration sequence at first glance appears to be highly disconnected. However, itis through the judicious use of both these devices that Joyce succeeds in portraying with a great(p)deal of world the progression of thought in the human mind. By victimization this peculiar(a) mode ofnarration, Joyce makes us realize that, the process of thinking is not merry and continuous afterthe fashion of a well-crafted chain of deductive logic. Rather, this indorser is presented with adifferent paradigm that of staccato bursts mistily but sure as shooting connected by the wispy links ofkey phrases and events. The unmistakable depicted object Joyce leaves us wi th is that human thoughtdoes not proceed in a straight line.Eveline is the story of a young girl her memories, fears and aspirations. It is no meanspiritedfeat to convey the naked thoughts of a human being, to paint the tame and the bright shades offeeling with like fidelity and to bring grit what has been lost during the translation to words. Wecan start to appreciate how Joyce does this by considering the dispersal of sentences in someof the paragraphs in the story. At first sight, the sentences appear to be rather slapdash in thatthey do not bear the punctuate of being part of a continuous sequence of logical thought, as onewould expect from a piece of formal writing. The following lines garnish this point...she heard his footsteps clacking along th... ...e breaking from past to present. One could verbalize that it is the pivot about which the frame ofreference is rotated from past into present. Of course, this is only the most explicit example ofsuch temporal shifts t hat abound in this work. It should be noted however that rarely does such ashift occur in the actual tense of the verbs involved. Rather, Joyce hints at it by using devicessuch as that discussed above.We can thus see that Joyce succeeds to a great extent in charting the currents of thoughtin the mind of his protagonist in a most realistic way. The devices used are subtle and cagyand one might say considering the period in which he created Eveline genuinely unconventional.While Joyces breaking of conventions is apparent in Eveline, it is his novels, Ulysses andFinnegans bestir that offer a wider scope for this literary avant-garde.