English Audio Request

Plot
Eveline is a nineteen- year-old girl, who lives with a drunken, violent father and a younger brother and sister in a modest house in Dublin. Her life is spent in dusting and cleaning the house and taking care of her family, since her mother has died some years before. She also works as a shop assistant at the Stores, but she gives all the money she earns to her father and every time she has to do the shopping for her family, there is a quarrel about it. At the Stores too, she is ill-treated and exploited by her superior. She has got a boyfriend, Frank, who has asked her to follow him to Buenos Aires, where he has got a house and where he wants to marry her. She is tired of her sordid routine and she has decided to escape with Frank. He has already bought the tickets for the passage to Buenos Aires and that next day they are leaving together.
The first part of the story is set in Eveline’s living-room and describes Eveline’s thoughts the night before the escape. She is torn between desire to escape her hard life and duty, between the need of freedom and adventure and the attachment to her home and her shabby, but well-known life. The key point, the epiphany of the story, is the sound of a street organ: it reminds her of the night that her mother died (also in that night they had heard an organ player in the street and her father had cursed at him and all foreigners and had paid him to move off). The sound of the street organ reminds her to the promise she had made to her mother to ‘keep the home together as long as she could’ . At the same moment she realizes that she is doomed to live ‘a life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness’, like her mother. This epiphany gives her the courage to leave the house and meet Frank at the port, to pursue her ‘right to happiness’.
But at the end, she is unable to act: when she is on the quayside, she is like paralysed and is not able to get on board of the ship (‘All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart’). She is overwhelmed by all her fears, she is passive (like a ‘helpless animal’), resigned, frightened by any change. The father’s house is dusty, but it is known, safe. She gives up her chance of happiness because she realizes that her life is in Dublin- Her affection to Frank turns out to be a very weak and superficial feeling, compared to family ties and duty.