Open    Access



An Appreciation of James Joyce’s Writing Methods in “Eveline”



Author(s)

WANG Xiao-yan

Full-Text PDF XML     950 Views

DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2014.05.008

Changchun University, Changchun, China

James Joyce (1882-1941) is an Irish novelist, a major figure of modern world literature. He revolted against the traditional techniques in novel writing and experimented extensively in language and style to create a new kind of novel. His name is associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique, and his influence is still profoundly felt today. His first important work, Dubliners (1999), is regarded as one of his best short stories, with a collection of 15 short stories in it, and “Eveline” is one of the 15 stories. It tells a story of a 19-year-old girl, Eveline, who suffers the inner struggle to escape the dull and hard life in Dublin with her boyfriend, but it is doomed to end in failure. Short as it is, it is really worth careful analysis and appreciation. This paper, first of all, gives a brief introduction of the story. Then it mainly explores James Joyce’s writing methods used in the story in three brief aspects: his method in the flow of experience, his method of “epiphanies”, and his symbolic method, and all of them have laid a solid foundation for the method of “stream of consciousness” in his later works.

 “Eveline”, “the flow of experience”, “epiphanies”, symblic method