“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.

”
“No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those
memories.”
Murakami, Haruki

Memories, all of our life's special moments, the good ones and the bad ones,
they all come together to create and define ourselves. Because of the memories we have
and the experiences we have lived, we are who we are.

We can often connect our memories with different stimulus we receive through
the day, whether it's visual, sensorial, through tastes or sounds; we can always relive
particular moments in our lives. They can be as nostalgic as remembering ones
childhood by watching your favorite toy at a toy store, or as recent as smelling the cup
of coffee you just had in the morning.

We can see in James Joyce's story, that he narrate us the troubles of our
protagonist Eveline; a woman trapped between her memories and her future, a woman
that grew up playing with other children in her neighborhood, a woman that lost her
mother and had an aggressive father, with two brothers, one of them dead and the other
one distant, a women that has found and escape, a new life with a new love, a women
who can't decide what is going to be best for her.

This is Eveline, a story about a woman that is trying to make one of the most
difficult choices in her life so far, and that is, to stay with her father and brother and live
the life she has been living so far, or move away with her lover Frank to a distant
country, beginning a new, different life far away from home.
As she is trying to take the right choice we can see some of the different things that lead
her of making such a big decision.

At first we can see that she, Eveline, is feeling somewhat blue, watching outside
the window and remembering her childhood, as she recalls that before the houses that
stand in the streets nowadays there was a big field where a lot of kids played there, as
well as some memories of her father playing with her too, creating a nostalgic feeling
followed by a sad one, remembering that all of these children had grown up and gone
away, that her mother past away and her father had changed because of it, reasons for
her to go away too.

Later on, we have an Eveline, overwhelmed by all the things her father says and
does to her, by all the work she has to do around the house, all the pressure she was
feeling from everyone, all the comments she was going to get by leaving with a lover,
the hard life she was living on as she stayed home, and the relief of leaving all of this
behind as she was about to leave.

Another of the reasons why Eveline is leaving was Frank, his new lover, she had
fallen in love with him, and he had fallen for Buenos Ayres, the place where Eveline's
new home was going to be, following Frank would lead her a new life, a fresh start, and
was going to leave all of her troubles and worries behind, she was feeling confident and
wise about making this decision.
 Closing in the time of departure, we can see how Eveline, as confident as she
was, she was about to write two letters, one for her father and one for her brother, there
where goodbye letters, but the sudden noise of a street organ began to fill her head with
memories of her mother, and remembered precisely the last night of her mother's illness,
and the promise she had made with her mother. She was starting to feel guilty and
frightened about leaving her home.

Finally, the moment of truth, the moment that she was so eager about, the
moment when Frank was excited for, the moment where she was going to start a new
life, that moment when she lost all of her confidence and stood still, she couldn't leave
her home, she couldn't break the promise that she had with her mother, that moment
when she decided that the memories of the life she had lived were more valuable than
the future she could have had. Sadness was felt from both sides.

Joyce uses a lot of these stimuli mixed within the memories of Eveline to make
us, the readers, feel that we are involved, submerged in the story itself, he creates an
environment we could all feel that we are exactly where she is, the moments that she
lived, the ones that she is about to live and the emotions she is feeling throughout the
story.

One of the biggest attributes of Joyce's way of telling us the story is the amount
of detail he provides, it is unremarkable, the quantity and quality of each and every
detail about everything that he tells us, the smell of somewhere "Her head was leaned
against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne."
The location of something "And yet during all those years she had never found out the
name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken
harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises mage to Blessed Margaret Mary
Alacoque".
The description of someone "Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted (...) he was
standing at the gate his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled
forward over a face of bronze (...) he was awfully fond of music and sang a little".

All of these, the memories, the stimuli and the details mixed together make
Eveline a story you feel immersed in, and that is what James Joyce has made for us, a
story in which all of the emotions, all the atmosphere, all the memories she was living,
we could feel it as well.

Murakami, H. recovered from http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/memories at the

date of November 28th 2016.

Joyce, James. (1914) Eveline, from Dubliners. Grant Richards Ltd, London.