Joyce´s "Eveline," begins with the powerful evocation of dust and paralysis, in those opening lines that powerfully foreshadow and reinforce the practical decisions (or lack of them) that decides Eveline´s fate in this short, moving story about the collapse of choices in the life of a young Irish girl.

The passive voice in "Her head was leaned against the window curtains," (rather than "her head leaned or leant against the window curtains") is reinforced by the passive voyeurism of the opening line and the self-defined helplessness of her role, framed and barricaded behind glass merely "watching the evening invade the avenue," rather than being part of the action.  Joyce closes the paragraph with the short emphatic finality of the line, "She was tired," and its dominant tone is of weariness, paralysis and moribundity, determining in those very first words Eveline´s final, perhaps tragic, inability to act. 

The dust motif recurs in the story, from that opening image of pervasive decay "in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne," to the symbolic role in the third paragraph as a measure of a kind, of her life, not unlike Eliot´s measurement of urbane banality in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."  Eveline´s world is even more delimited, and narrowly cramped:

Home!  She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar object which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.

The exclamatory thrill of the first word subsequently collapses literally into dust.  It is in the context of such decay that Eveline is offered the chance to elope with Frank, "very kind, manly, open-hearted" but further defined, and made for both the reader and for Eveline herself something of an enigma, by the father´s incisive summation, "I know these sailor chaps."

The bulk of the story establishes the more or less sordid and perhaps too-common back-story that Eveline has to tell: of an abusive and generally careless father, of siblings who have either died or drifted away, of a life turned to drudgery when Eveline takes over the role of her dead mother as care-taker and maid servant of the house.  In the course of the back-story, Eveline plays through the possible reactions to her elopement from the sly satisfaction of her supervisor at work knowing that "she had run away with a fellow," and all the moral censure that such gossip implies, to the presumably stunned reaction of her family, the mute disapproval of the unnamed priest whose photograph surveys the family parlor, and the fantasy prospect of her own imminent transformation into a wife, "people would treat her with respect then.  She would not be treated as her mother had been."  Even Eveline´s mother watches over the decision, and contributes her own perspective, uttered years earlier like a self-fulfilling prophecy, "Derevaun Seraun!  Derevaun Seraun!" ("the end of pleasure is pain."

When Eveline fails to act, refusing to respond to the Frank´s simple and perhaps well-meant imperative (with all its sexual entendre), "Come!", she shapes her actions by inaction.  She becomes still and statuesque, pale and "set," unmoving in Joyce´s description of her "passive like a helpless animal.  Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition."

Eveline´s paralysis at the "barrier" creates the lingering puzzle that is Joyce´s story.  What shapes her actions, or her inactions?  How is the reader to perceive Frank´s intentions and her probable fate with him?  Is he "honorable" (a serious concern, for all its quaintness to modern eyes)?  Does she owe a debt of "duty" to her family or father, despite the mistreatment that most readers would see in her familial relations?  Is she bound by the moral precepts of her church or the vague death-bed promise to her mother?  Is she a victim of narrow Irish patriarchy and a society in which women are second-class citizens?  Or is her refusal to go with Frank, a narrow escape from a worse fate as her father cryptically (and self-interestedly) warns?  The reader has to determine those things, and shape the clues from the richly textured text.

Take a look now, at Joyce's "Araby."  Are there similar themes?  Why does Joyce lead us along on a similarly failing quest in that story?