A Derridean Study of James Joyce’s “Eveline”

The present study is aimed at investigating James Joyce’s “Eveline”, which has been selected from his volume of short stories named Dubliners (۱۹۱۴), within the deconstruction framework. What Jacques Derrida, the pioneer of deconstruction, states regarding the undecidability of meaning in his influential paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (۱۹۶۶), has been figured out as an appropriate method for analyzing the story. By devoting a kind of close attention to the language of the text, the essay argues that there exist some gaps, breaks, silences, contradictions, and ambiguities within the narrative which lead to conflicting interpretations. As a matter of fact, each story in Dubliners in general and “Eveline” in particular, contain a missing piece of information, an unexplained scene, and an image that has not been elucidated fully which invite the readers to look closely and piece the different parts together in approaching the gaps and silences that lead to nowhere but indeterminate meanings.

Keywords:

Deconstruction , gap , Contradiction , Inconsistency , Eveline