This, Joyce believed, is what Dublin – and, indeed, much of Ireland – was like as a whole: paralysed. One of the key words in Joyce’s Dubliners is ‘paralysis’: people feel immobilised, unable to move or progress, trapped in their own lives. Life is often full of half-grasped truths and hidden motivations, and sometimes our motivations are even partially concealed from ourselves, as we exist in a state of ambivalence and uncertainty. This is in keeping with much modernist fiction, which avoids giving us clear direction as to how we should respond to the events described in the story. Is it filial duty to her father and brother that makes her turn back? Or is it a nostalgic attachment to Ireland, and the happy memories that it carries for her, even though most of the people who shared those memories with her have either emigrated ( back to England, revealingly) or have died?

The masterstroke on Joyce’s part is refraining from telling us precisely what makes Eveline stay in Dublin at the end of the story. Is it this nostalgia for old Ireland – embodied by her childhood memories – that prevents her from emigrating with Frank? Perhaps. ‘That was a long time ago’, and everything has changed, yet Eveline sits and reminisces about this happy time from her childhood.Īnd this brings us to one of the most difficult aspects of Joyce’s story to analyse and pin down. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. That was a long time ago she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Her father was not so bad then and besides, her mother was alive. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field – the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. 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. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people’s children. The man out of the last house passed on his way home she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. She cannot let go of the past, as the early sections of the story reveal: The way that final triplet builds out from love to farewell to recognition (what, she now doesn’t even recognise him?) is a masterstroke on Joyce’s part.

James joyce work in progress