Short Fiction I unit test

Round vs flat character

Juxtaposition in fiction

Flashback and flashforward

Tone in fiction

Character vs characterization

Gothic conventions

Free indirect discourse

Exposition and how good writers hide it

Chekhov's gun

Closed vs open ending

Foreshadowing

Objective correlative

PROSE FICTION ANALYSIS (6 points). In James Joyce's short story "Eveline," from the collection Dubliners (published 1914), a young woman weighs leaving Dublin. The story, described in our own words (read the full text, which is in the public domain): The story opens with Eveline seated at a window, watching the evening invade the avenue, her head against the curtains, tired, smelling dusty cretonne. The narration stays close to her consciousness throughout while remaining in the third person, drifting between present observation and memory without marking the transitions. She reviews the field where children once played before a man from Belfast bought it and built houses, and she notes which of the children have grown up, moved away, or died. She considers the objects in the room she has dusted weekly for years and wonders where all the dust comes from, and looks at a yellowing photograph of a priest whose name she was never told. She is nineteen and has agreed to leave with Frank, a sailor who has told her stories of Buenos Aires, taken her to see a Bohemian Girl at the theater, and sung to her. Her father has forbidden the courtship after a quarrel. She reviews what she would leave: hard work at the Stores under Miss Gavan's sharp supervision, wages surrendered entirely to her father who accuses her of squandering money, responsibility for two young children, and a father whose violence she has begun to fear now that her brothers can no longer protect her. Against this she sets a promise made to her dying mother to keep the home together as long as she could, and she recalls her mother's final delirium and a phrase repeated in it. Remembering the pitiful vision of her mother's life of commonplace sacrifice closing in final craziness, she stands up in terror and resolves to escape. At the North Wall she stands among the crowd at the boat, Frank holding her hand and talking of passage. She hears a bell clang upon her heart, feels him seize her hand, and prays to God to direct her. She grips the iron railing with both hands. When he calls her name and is swept forward, calling her to come, she does not move: the narrator says she set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal, and that her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition. Write a well-written essay analyzing how Joyce uses literary elements and techniques to develop the complex portrayal of Eveline's situation. You should: present a thesis with a defensible interpretation; select and use evidence to support your line of reasoning; explain how the evidence supports it; and use appropriate grammar and punctuation.