The Dubliners

Summary

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.

Commentary

It is yet another Dubliners tale about paralysis, as Eveline stands on the pier at story's end, 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. A crippled childhood friend called Little Keogh, whom Eveline recalls early in the story, perhaps foreshadows her own eventual paralysis.

Death pervades "Eveline" too: the deaths of her mother and her brother Ernest, and of a girlhood friend named Tizzie Dunn. And of course, Eveline fears her own death: "he would drown her," she thinks of Frank, defying logic. Perhaps she unconsciously associates her fiancÐ"© with the other man in her life, her brutal father.

Thus, this is the third Dubliners story in a row about a failed quest. The Holy Grail of the boy in "An Encounter" was the Pigeon House, which he never reached; the main character in "Araby" sought the bazaar, closing down by the time he got there. Eveline seeks Argentina, a place where she hopes to avoid the very real threat of her father's violence as well as her dead mother's "life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness." "People would treat her with respect," Eveline thinks of married life in Argentina.

She believes she has a right to happiness, tooÐ'--that is, until she stands on the shore and confronts the reality of the journey on which she is about to embark. Then fear and guilt (about abandoning her father and her younger siblings) overwhelm her, and she stays rather than goes. Though it is as old and dusty as her father's house ("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"), Dublin is at least familiar, and Eveline is a fearful young woman, obsessed with thoughts of wild Patagonians and remembered ghost stories. "He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow," the tale concludes. "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." Though this is not certain, it seems unlikely that Eveline will ever leave home now. Frank seems to have been her last, best chance.

Summary

A young boy who is similar in age and temperament to those in "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" develops a crush on Mangan's sister, a girl who lives across the street. One evening she asks him if he plans to go to a bazaar called Araby. The girl will be away on a retreat when the bazaar is held and therefore unable to attend. The boy promises that if he goes he will bring her something from Araby.

The boy requests and receives permission to attend the bazaar on Saturday night. When Saturday night comes, however, his uncle returns home late, possibly having visited a pub after work. After much anguished waiting, the boy receives money for the bazaar, but by the time he arrives at Araby, it is too late. The event is shutting down for the night, and he does not have enough money to buy something nice for Mangan's sister anyway. The boy cries in frustration.

Commentary

Like the two previous stories, "The Sisters" and "An Encounter," "Araby" is about a somewhat introverted boy fumbling toward adulthood with little in the way of guidance from family or community. The truants in "An Encounter" managed to play hooky from school without any major consequences; no one prevented them from journeying across town on a weekday or even asked the boys where they were going. Similarly, the young protagonist of this story leaves his house after nine o'clock at night, when "people are in bed and after their first sleep," and travels through the city in darkness with the assent of his guardians. Like the main character in "The Sisters," this boy lives not with his parents but with an aunt and uncle, the latter of whom is certainly good-natured but seems to have a drinking problem. When the man returns home, he is talking to himself and he almost knocks over the coat rack. He has forgotten about his promise to the boy, and when reminded of itÐ'--twiceÐ'--he becomes distracted by the connection between the name of the bazaar and the title of a poem he knows. The boy's aunt is so passive that her presence proves inconsequential.

Like "An Encounter," "Araby" takes the form of a questÐ'--a journey in search of something precious or even sacred. Once again, the quest is ultimately in vain. In "An Encounter," the Pigeon House was the object of the search; here, it is Araby. Note the sense of something passionately sought, against the odds: "We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers . . . . These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes."

Although the boy ultimately reaches the bazaar,