Alienation In Joyce's Eveline

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Joyce’s alienated Eveline

Imagine yourself witnessing the changes in your hometown. The environment and people become more and more unfamiliar to you. Your friends and family may scatter around different places. Would you feel alienated from the place you grow up in? In fact, this is what Joyce’s Eveline experiences. In Joyce’s Eveline, one of the short stories in Dubliners, alienation is a dominant theme. Alienation is described as a result of change in the physical environment, family, and home. It is also a result of low sense of belonging towards work. All these feelings of alienation contribute to Eveline’s indecisiveness. Speaking of alienation, we can refer to Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. Alienation of humankind “means the loss of control: its embodiment in an alien force which confronts the individuals as a hostile and potentially destructive power” (Mészáros 8). Besides, in general sense, alienation is “a condition of the mind” (Saleem 68), which can be understood as “the basic form of rootlessness” and a “natural consequence of existential predicament both in intrinsic and extrinsic terms” (67). Existentialism means the values, attitudes and relationships that contribute to one’s “role in society and the freedom or bondage that he is subjected to” (68). In other words, existential predicament echoes with Camus’s thought of absurdism: “life is inherently absurd and purposeless” (Jones). Owing to the historical context, such as the world wars and

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