It is very difficult to give an interpretation to one of Joyce's texts. First of all not all interpretations are being equally valid. If they were, this would mean that the author may be safely declared "dead", because all the symbols and enigmas have been revealed. .Secondly, we have to be careful and not to state that the text "means" something. By doing that we fall into its trap. Having this in mind, we will try to provide a critical interpretation of the text and to come with arguments to support our ideas. The text on which we will try to make several observations and notes is Eveline, the first story from a collection intituled Dubliners. A title such as Joyce. Chaos or Complexity? is very ambitious and could be the topic of an entire book. Not having the knowledge nor the experience to go deeper with our analysis, we will resume to a couple of pages, in which we will try to prove that all the elements, symbols and images are not at random, or part of a "chaos", but they are connected and carefully constructed, splendidly developed in a style as fresh and original as the stories themselves.
Before getting to our commentary, we will make a summary of the text to remember the plot. Eveline Hill, a 19-year-old woman who works in a Dublin shop, sits inside her family's house recalling childhood, including some happy memories as well as her father's drunken brutality to her and her siblings. Eveline thinks about people she has known who have either left Ireland (a priest who has traveled to Melbourne, for example) or died (her mother and her brother Ernest), and of her own plans to leave the country with a man named Frank. She recalls meeting Frank, an Irish sailor now living in Argentina, and dating him while he visited Dublin on vacation. Eveline also thinks about her father's disapproval of Frank, and of her promise "to keep the home together as long as she could" before her mother grew deranged and died. Later, gripped by fear of the unknown and probably guilt as well, Eveline finds herself unable to board the ferry to England, where she and Frank are scheduled to meet a ship bound for South America.
He leaves without her.

To begin with, the text is inherently interrogative, posing its questions and riddles to the reader while evading answers and resolutions. Here we
recognize one of the feature of the modernism : providing the reader with the opportunity to "recognize his or her own cognitive abilities and to test one's own
humanity, errors and all." This modernist text presents a field of possibilities and allows the reader to decide what approach to take. By reading this text we can feel how our understanding of literature is being challenged. From now on, when we speak about literature, we speak about the distinction between narrator and writer, we speak about voice and perspective, we speak about going back and forward in time, style, language, etc.
Although short and easy to read, this story is devastating, possibly the most powerful in the book. It is yet another Dubliners tale about paralysis, one of the main motives of Joyce's work. The story is carefully constructed, and one of the arguments is that the story starts and ends in a similar way. We can speak about another feature of modernism, the spheroidal construction of the text. At the beginning we find Eveline at the window, staying still, contemplating, frozen by memories. The same image of stillness can be found in the end, when Eveline stands on the pier, frozen in place by fear and guilt. She wants to leave Ireland, but she quite literally cannot move, speak, or even express emotion on her face.
In order to understand Eveline's attitude, we have to get ourselves familiarised with Joyce's perspective regarding Dublin and life in Ireland. For the author of Dubliners, life in Ireland is similar to life in captivity, in a cage, the man has no possibility to escape. Each story of his collection contains a point, phrase, or symbol that encapsulates the essence of a complicated experience, which Joyce called an epiphany.
As far as we are able to judge, we think that Eveline wants to leave with Frank, but she ,like others, cannot break the circle around her. There are only few who managed to pass beyond this barrier. One of them is the priest from the photograph hung on the wall who "is in Melbourne now". For others, like Ernest, Tizzi Dunn, or Eveline's mother ,only death could offer an escape.
As a subsidiary argument for the idea of "life in captivity" we will refer to the way in which the story starts. Right from the beginning, we can observe that the space is reducing round Eveline. We have the image of the evening, the image of the avenue, the image of a man passing by, and finally the image of Eveline's room. Therefore it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to escape from a place in which everything draws back, everything "shrinks".
This observation is supported by the scene at the end of the story. Note that Eveline's paralysis is preceded by a prayer "to God to direct her, to show her
what was her duty", and that a bell, similar to a church bell, clangs "upon her heart" as Frank grasps her hand in vain. In this scene, the space reduces as well.
The image of God, the bell of a church, and finally her heart. The sound of the bell is like a signal, that attentions her, that she is not supposed to leave this space. She wants to leave, she believes that she has the right to be happy, she wants to be treated with respect, until she stands on that shore and confronts with the reality of the journey. For her, the fact that her neighbours named the Waters have "gone back to England" is something real great. She cannot stay far from home, so it goes without saying that a life across the Atlantic is out of the question.
Althought her house is old and dusty ("She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from"), as well as Dublin, at least it is familiar. Let us remark that another reason for which Eveline cannot make the journey is that she is scared. She is a fearful young woman, and we say this, having in mind the fact that she still remembers with fear stories with ghosts and wild Patagonians.
The story concludes with Frank "rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.". She remains in Dublin "to keep the home together "on one hand, and on the other hand because she was not compatible with Frank. We speak here about an opposition between close space (Eveline) and exotic place (Frank).Though this is not certain, it seems unlikely that Eveline will ever leave home now. Frank seems to have been her last chance.
Instead of a conclusion regarding Eveline and Joyce's work, we find it more appropriate to end with the following quote :

"When we have read him and absorbed even one iota of his substance, neither literature nor life can ever be quite the same again. We shall be finding an embarrassing joy in the commonplace, seeing the most defiled city as a figure of heaven, and assuming, against all odds, a hardly supportable optimism."

(Anthony Burgess , ReJoyce)


Bibliography:

Anthony Burgess - ReJoyce ,W. Norton, 2000
Tim Conley – Joyce's Mistakes: Problems of Intention, Irony, and Interpretation,
University of Toronto Press, 2003,