"Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself.... So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him...."
Eliza is one of the sisters of the title. The centerpiece of the story is the man to whom she is referring who just so happens to be a priest. The priest has died recently, and the story is being told by a young male narrator said to be based on the youth of the author. It is typically Joycean in the lack of action and the focus on mood and atmosphere. For the most part, that tone is dark and solemn and perhaps even a little grotesque. The quote above brings the story to its conclusion and seems almost inappropriately out of place.
North Richmond Street being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free.
The opening line of one of the most famous short stories, period, is also, naturally, one of the most famous quotes in Joycean canon. It is an odd opening with the syntax strangely twisted and the word choice more than a little unusual. The sentence leads inexorably to the story’s final line:
“Gazing up in the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
So the story begins with the dislocation of a street being referred to as unable to see and ends with a metaphorical image of human eyes on fire with extreme elemental emotions. In between the narrator presents the population of that street as being out of place among the solid construction of its buildings. Irony is only hinted at, but drips broadly and deeply across the breadth of the narrative unifying the beginning and end.
"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"
The short stories of James Joyce are not about action, but epiphany. And in many cases the epiphany collapses amid a crumbling of inaction. Such is the case of Eveline who at this moment in the story is recalling the insane ramblings of her mother. Eveline is a twisted, pathetic soul who longs to break free from the prison of her miserable loneliness by escaping to Buenos Aires with Frank, a sailor. This recollection of the insanity of her mother is part of a twofer in which her dad doesn’t come off any better. The words ringing in her head become the neural pathway to the moment of epiphany which is followed by her suddenly standing up in terror at the thought of not taking this chance to escape. And yet, the story ends with emotional paralysis telling Frank to go on without her even as he cries out her name for her to follow.
