As the protagonist, Eveline, thinks and recalls events, people, and landscapes throughout the story, she feels different emotions. As such, the story’s tone changes to reflect how Eveline is feeling. It is overall passionate, as it is informed by Eveline’s intense emotions.
At the beginning of the story, the tone is nostalgic as Eveline thinks of her childhood. After she remembers playing with her siblings and neighbors the Devines, Waters, Dunns, and little Keogh the cripple, Eveline thinks “still they seemed to have been rather happy then” despite the fact her father used to “hunt them in out of the field with a blackthorn stick.” When her mind turns to home, her nostalgia continues. The “yellowing photograph” hanging on the wall reminds her of the priest, a “school friend of her father” now in Melbourne, and a “coloured print” makes her think of “promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque.”
The story’s tone grows apprehensive immediately after as Eveline begins to question her plan to leave home for a new life in Buenos Ayres. She thinks, “was that wise” and tries to “weigh each side of the question.” But her feelings change again as she thinks of the Stores, the business where she works, and Miss Gavan, her employer. Because working causes her to feel like she has “an edge on her,” Joyce’s figurative description of Eveline feeling tense, the idea of leaving fills her with hope. She insists that “in her new home, it would not be like that. She would be married—she, Eveline.” The tone here is optimistic as Eveline considers her future and a life away from Dublin.
After this moment, though, Eveline thinks of her father, and the story’s tone turns mournful:
“Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire.”
This passage’s tone captures Eveline’s sadness as she recalls a happier time with her father. The thought of him growing old causes her to think, wistfully, that “he would miss her” if she left Dublin. This change in tone is significant because it reflects Eveline’s Catholic guilt over abandoning her responsibilities, and her sadness and inner conflict persists throughout the rest of the story.
In one instance, Joyce uses irony to emphasize Eveline’s indecisiveness:
“It was hard work—a hard life—but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.”
Although in the sentence prior Eveline describes the difficulties of her work, the tone here is straightforward, even pleasant. However, Eveline later contradicts herself in a moment of desperation after she remembers her mother repeating the senseless phrase “Derevaun Seraun” and tells herself she must “Escape!” This difference in tone, an example of irony, highlights the conflicting nature of Eveline’s thoughts and feelings.
