What happens in James Joyce's "Eveline"?

A nineteen-year-old Dublin woman, Eveline Hill, sits at a window reviewing her hard life, then walks to the dock to sail to Buenos Aires with a man named Frank. At the gangplank her body refuses; she grips the railing and does not board the ship.

How does John Banville interpret Eveline's decision?

Banville reads her refusal not as lost nerve but as a genuine, even heroic decision. He argues Eveline recognizes that Frank's Buenos Aires would be 'a little Dublin away from Dublin' — that the escape on offer is no real escape — and chooses her own narrow world instead.

Why does the story end ambiguously?

Joyce ends on the bell clanging upon Eveline's heart without saying whether it's a warning bell or a summoning bell. Banville says this refusal to tell the reader what to conclude is exactly why the story is so wonderful.

John Banville on James Joyce's Dubliners

Eveline at the Gangplank: Why She Doesn't Board the Ship

By John Kaag

with commentary by John Banville

“Eveline” is four pages long. It has almost no plot. A nineteen-year-old woman sits at a window, thinks about her life, walks to a dock, and does not board a ship. That is everything that happens. It is one of the most debated stories James Joyce ever wrote, and the argument at its center (did Eveline make the right decision?) has never been settled. Joyce made sure of that.

John Banville’s reading of “Eveline,” in his Rebind commentary on Dubliners, resists the obvious verdict, namely that Eveline simply lost her nerve, and builds instead a case for the story as something much stranger and more honest: a portrait of a person who looked at freedom and recognized, correctly, that it terrified her.

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