rite a two to three page essay, typed, double-spaced, on any topic regarding one of the short stories we’ve read.
1. Derevaun Seraun. In James Joyce’s “Eveline,” the title character’s mother on her deathbed mutters words that may be translated “the end of pleasure is pain.” Or they may just be the singsong nonsense of dementia. How can Eveline’s experience in this story be understood as in part a paralyzed response to her mother’s ambiguous words? Do the words at times urge her toward a better life, at others urge her to remain within a life like her mother’s?
Point of View: James Joyce, “Eveline”; “Sample Student Analysis”
PROLOGUE
Point of View
One of the things we noted about Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is how strange the voice of it seems. We wonder, Who is speaking? Where? When? I suggested the voice might be a long record of the mother’s teaching in the mind of her grownup daughter. What interests me today are again such questions about the voice of fiction: “Who is speaking? Where? When?
These are, technically speaking, “point of view” questions.
In the simplest definition, literary “point of view” means the perspective, the angle of perception or knowledge, from which a story is told.
“Point of view” is signaled grammatically by the predominant pronoun in a piece of storytelling: Take a look at presiding pronouns in a text: Does “I” or “you” or “he” or “they” or even “we” predominate in the sentences? Point of view can be human , inhuman , or superhuman. The “I” can be very specific, a barber talking while he cuts a guy’s hair. But it can also be inhumanly objective, “mechanical,” like the voice of Raymond Carver’s story. Novelists and story writers in the 18th and early 19th century sometimes preferred a kind of “Godlike” point of view, telling stories in which every character’s thoughts and feelings were available to the storyteller whenever they pleased. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a good example of this “omniscient” narrator. Modern writers often limit themselves to a single character’s point of view, either letting them tell their story in the first person or sharing a character’s interior life by a kind of intimate, or “close,” third person .
In general, point of view can be broken into “1ST Person” stories, told by a specific “I,” and “3RD Person stories,” using “he,” “she,” or “they.”
But this 3rd person point of view comes in three very different flavors:
Objective, “fly-on-the-wall” perspective
Limited 3rd person point of view
Omniscient, “Godlike,” point of view, with access to the inner life of many characters
PASSAGES
James Joyce, “Eveline”
Joyce’s “Eveline” is a fine example of “limited third person.” The opening paragraph gives us a very still, frankly inert portrait of the title character, looking out from behind a pane of glass, at a largely lifeless scene. She smells the dust and feels “tired” (309). With that third sentence, “She was tired,” we are brought into the inner life of Eveline, how she feels in this scene (which might be used as a tv ad for antidepressants!). The “footsteps” of the second paragraph, “clacking” on concrete, then “crunching” on the cinder path, are a nice example of the kind of concrete imagery, or sensory details, that can bring a story to life. But after all, there’s not much life in this opening, certainly not in Eveline.
