Example Of James Joyce Paper Essay

Write an essay about the meaning of home in the protagonist in Joyce’s Eveline and Ernest Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home.
This short story by James Joyce featuring Eveline as the main character or protagonist revolves around the central theme of escape. Eveline is a typical girl who lives in Ireland, an English territory in the Atlantic Ocean close to the empire’s main landmass. The story begins by describing a scene where the main character stares at her surroundings, at the inside of their home, and remembering how things changed so fast starting from when she was just a child and now that she is already about to get married to a guy from Buenos Aires named Frank.
She realizes that a lot of things, particularly in their house and the people living in it, have changed. Home is rather rhetorically described here in this story. It seems that from the beginning of the story, what Eveline wanted was to leave home. In Eveline’s case, the term home does not only apply to the physical building or the erected structure that houses her and other members of her family but rather a place that triggers a lot of memories, often bad ones such as the bad things that her cruel father did to her (i.e. Eveline often recalls her father beating her and her brothers, often threatening them with acts of violence, inducing fear in the process), and also the death of their mother.
For Eveline, home is a place that she wants to protect but at the same time escape from. She wants to protect it because it was her mom’s last wish that she would keep their home for as long as possible and she promised that she would fulfill that promise. However, what hinders her from fulfilling it are the bad memories that get triggered whenever she remembers their home and every bad thing that happened in it. What is bewildering about Eveline, however, is that she still chose to stay in the very same place that she dreads even after getting a solid chance to escape from it. Some possible reasons behind this rather impractical decision could be her concern for her father and the promise that she gave to her mother before she died. Home, in this case, can pertain to the infrastructure that triggers bad memories for Eveline, or Ireland, which is her home country, which by the way she highly regards, as evidenced by her negative perception about people leaving Ireland, saying that these people are ungrateful children of their country.
Ernst Hemingway’s Soldier’s Home, on the other hand, home has been depicted as a place where a soldier who has just finished serving the military in a war, can come back to. It was not described as a place for reminiscing unlike in Joyce’s Eveline. Soldier’s Home tells a story about Harold Krebs, a soldier serving the United States marine who was one of the brave soldiers of World War I. In the story, the protagonist describes home or in that case, his hometown as a place of stagnation because he thinks that after the war, a lot of things have already changed in him but the home that he visits after every work season still remains the same, even the people in the neighborhood among other details. Home, was not the main theme of the story, however. Rather, it was a story about truths and lies, particularly in the field of military and Harold Krebs’ personal life and relationship with her mother.