James Joyce is one of the prevailing modernist writers of the canon. The modernist movement sought to offer insight into consciousness, through a narrative aligned with character’s inner thoughts, often using free indirect discourse to do so. Reflecting on how Joyce convinces his reader to sympathise with the main character, in his short story ‘Eveline’ from the 1994 collection Dubliners (Joyce and Brown, 2000, pp. 29 – 34), this essay will use Leech and Short’s (2007) model for the analysis of speech and thought representation. While there are other models of discourse representation, this one is particularly useful as it separates speech and thought representation and therefore, lends itself well to narratives such as these, where one mode predominates. The Fowler-Uspensky model of point of view (Uspensky, 1972; Fowler, 1996 [1986], pp.127-47) will also be used to locate narrative perspective. While the Fowler-Uspensky model is traditionally used to discuss point of view, it is relevant here as point of view is intrinsic to narrative voice.
Joyce uses free indirect thought representation to manipulate his readers’ perspective, to encourage them to sympathise with Eveline’s character. The narrative voice in ‘Eveline’ analysed in this essay is the fictional point of view, rather than discoursal, that is to say the ‘perspective through which a story is told’ (Simpson, 2014, pp.28). However, narration of the story is ‘different from and external to the story’ and exists on a different plane of exegesis (Simpson, 2014); therefore is heterodiegtic. The narration is presented in the past tense, ‘in the third person by a detached, invisible narrator’ who is omniscient, and has full access to the thoughts and feelings of a character’ (Simpson, 2014, pp.28).
Eveline is not the narrator of her own story, but the focaliser. Joyce uses the character as the ‘reflector of fiction’, with the story being told in relation to her (Leech and Short, 2007, p.174). In terms of...