My First Post

Welcome to Kayhonesty, where my honest opinions are written. This summer, I read an amazing short story titled “Eveline” by James Joyce. “Eveline” is about weak-willed, helpless nineteen-year-old woman, who puts her decisions and fate in the hands of others. Eveline is a complicated woman from the outside but she gets much simpler when you look more closely. At first, I believed she was just weak-willed and indisisve, but a closer look shows that she, like her father, hangs on to the past and its memories and enjoys the past more than she will ever enjoy the present or future. My favorite section of the story is the second paragraph when she is recollecting these memories of her past to dull the present. “Few people passed. 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. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people's children. 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 -- the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. 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. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.” (Joyce, James “Eveline”) This passage made me reread and reread it to fully understand all the hidden meanings behind each word. I love how she was remembering these moments of happiness and joy, trying to convince herself that this town (were she grew up) isn’t so bad and her father wasn’t so bad; yet she wants another life with Frank, her way out of this present town. This struggle shows her complexity and innocence and just draws me into to know more about Eveline and her life.