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Terence Patrick Murphy
Interpreting marked order narration: The case of James Joyce’s “Eveline”
The narrative use of the reverie over the past has often been seen as part of the stock-in-trade of popular fiction. This has produced scandal and silence in about equal measure. In many critical retellings of James Joyce’s “Eveline”, for example, the strategy of silence has prevailed, even when critics like Robert Scholes have attempted to make the relationship between story and récit the focus of their attention. A second form of neglect has resulted when critics attempt to read all narrative fictions as marked order narratives. To read all Joycean first-person narratives as marked order fictions is to obliterate what distinguishes chronologically ordinary and marked order narration altogether. In contrast, by focussing on the use of a marked order narrative in “Eveline”, I attempt to demonstrate how an understanding of the significance of this authorial choice can throw into relief the basis for divergent critical interpretations of the short story. Through the use of four diagrams, I also reconstruct the two different chronological possibilities that critics use when they read “Eveline”.
Journal of Literary Semantics, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0341-7638
Volume: 34, 10/2005
Pages: 107 - 124