Empty Spaces from Eveline It seems entirely appropriate that James Joyce lived in Europe at the time of Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Matisse; Throughout his book Dubliners, he draws his characters in a style that could be described as post-impressionist. Rather than clearly and smoothly depicting every feature of his characters, Joyce focuses on hinting at the emotional meanings of his depictions with a rich splash of thick paint here and there. Although Joyce flexes his descriptive muscles in the Dubliners' short story "Eveline" (1914), he leaves much to the reader's imagination through calculated omissions and suggestive phrases. Such omissions begin from the beginning of the story; “She would sit at the window and watch the evening invade the avenue” (Joyce 37). Joyce sets the scene with economy, simply letting the reader know that it is the beginning of the evening, a time of day that everyone can draw on their own memories and refer to. Naturally, it gets darker and darker, and this, combined with Eveline sitting and watching, suggests rest, so one might further assume that she is at home. The only thing left to think about is the use of the word “invade.” This usage really illustrates Joyce's technique in this story; this implies that this nighttime appearance may be undesirable, an idea reinforced by later events. All of this information was presented in one sentence. Another such example appears shortly after this sentence: And yet, in all these years, she had never known the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium next to the Color printing of the promises made to Blessed Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (38). Naturally, such a long... middle of paper...... expresses feelings without having to spell them out, surgically adding or removing bits in a strategy designed to create a certain type of feeling in the story, just like the artist's use of the space surrounding an object to make that object visible. Through her memories and reflections outside of the first person, Joyce constructs an open-ended Eveline who could become many different characters, and a malleable story in different time periods that could take on different tones, depending on who the reader is. / consulted: Joyce, James. “Eveline”, from Dubliners. New York: Everyman's Library, Alfred A Knopf, 1991. Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000. “Joyce, James.” Microsoft Corporation, 1997-2000. http://encarta.msn.comOxford English Dictionary Online http://dictionary.oed.com