A Whole Lotta Love

            While reading “Eveline”, I quickly noticed that the main character was a matured girl and that the story was written in third person narration, both of which were qualities different from the previous stories such as “Araby”.  One trait that both the main characters share is that they fall in love, but their feelings of love end up two different paths.  For the boy in “Araby”, the love started a very innocent and sexual desire where he “Had never spoken to her, …and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood. (Joyce 20), but at the end he undergoes an epiphany and realizes his foolishness when he views himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity” (24).  Even though he becomes heartbroken in the process, the boy seems to learn an important lesson in the process and matures from this experience.  Meanwhile, Eveline has a  different feeling impression on love when she thinks, “Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too” (28). Eveline uses her relationship in order to escape from her current life, and thus she views her fiancé as a savior first and a lover second.  While the boy matured through his love experience, Eveline becomes paralyzed at the end of the story and ends with “Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition” (29). Eveline appears paralyzed whether to live in her past in Dublin or move to an exciting new world where she can put the past behind her.  While the story ends with this image of paralysis, Eveline would ultimately have to make a choice on where to go.  Is there anyway the reader can infer on which way Eveline chooses based on the collection of stories as a whole?