"Eveline" : Round Characters

                Even within the short length of the story “Eveline,” James Joyce manages to fashion a rather complex dilemma on which the story is concentrated, and Joyce’s utilization of two round characters heightens the complexity of this issue. The first round character developed by Joyce is obviously Eveline herself. One on hand, Eveline expresses utter misery in the current lifestyle she is currently forced to live. In an effort to fulfill her promise to her dying mother, Eveline alone has remained with her alcoholic father to deal with his inebriated rage and potential violence on a daily basis. While all of her other family members passed away or left the home, she has struggled on a daily basis to care for her loathsome and repulsive father. Due to the sheer unhappiness of such a lifestyle, Eveline expresses a desire to run off with her lover, Frank, to begin a new life in Buenos Aires. On the other hand, however, Eveline begins to feel guilt for leaving her father and her current lifestyle behind. While she is desperate to escape the feeling of imprisonment which suffocates her in her current home, she is also paralyzed by the fear of leaving the life that she is “comfortable” in and venturing out into unknown lands with a man whom she hardly loves. She begins to talk herself out of escaping with Frank, assuring herself that her life at home isn’t unbearably miserable and, in reality, much more familiar to her. She reasons that she cannot leave her father alone in such a horrid state, yet, at the same time, she convinces herself that she deserves to follow her own dreams. She confusedly argues with herself, saying, “Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness” (Joyce, 221).  The constant presence of this internal conflict within Eveline therefore reveals that she is a round character in nature, for there are many dimensions to her personality. While a piece of Eveline longs for her own happiness, freedom, adventure, and the fulfillment of her own dreams, another dimension of her personality reveals her sense of duty to her father and her fear of embarking into the unknown.

                Surprisingly, Eveline’s father can also be seen as a round character. While the reader may initially assume that he is an entirely wicked man for conducting himself so poorly and treating his children so wretchedly and abusively, Eveline also explains the potential he had to be a good man and father. She recounts tales of times when he read her stories and made her toast in the fire, and she remembers “her father putting on her mother’s bonnet to make the children laugh” (Joyce, 220). When Eveline shares these memories, the reader is led to wonder what caused the father to collapse into such a horrible state in the first place if he was once a good man. While the father’s drunken state and poor choices remain inexcusable, the fact that he is portrayed as not entirely evil makes him a round character in that he, too, had multiple dimensions to his personality. When considering the multidimensional nature of Eveline’s father, therefore, the reader can gain somewhat of a better understanding of why Eveline struggled to such a great extent with her decision to leave her father and her home.