ABSTRACT
In Stephen Hero, an early draft of the Portrait, the hero speaks of his desire to write a book of epiphanies: Dubliners is that book. If Dubliners is a record of a series of defeats and failures (none of the characters is able to rise the squalor of Dublin life), the book itself is the triumphant action of an artist who has perceived in the trivial and vulgar events of the lives of Dubliners moments of significance, even moments of "delicate and evanescent" beauty. "Evelina," one of the simplest of the stories, offers a fine illustration of the epiphanal technique. The story begins with Evelina sitting next to the window of her house, immobile, thinking about her past. She is about to run off with a romantic sailor, Frank, to start a new life in Buenos Aires. The heroic status of Stephen has been widely challenged.
