narrator dives into the thoughts of Eveline, the adolescent girl who is debating whether to leave the city of Dublin with a sailor named Frank. The story is split into two halves: the first is the eponymous character thinking about her life in Dublin, and the second half is her attempting to board the boat to Buenos Aires. In each section, Joyce, in his Modernistic style, employs free indirect discourse: a type of stream of consciousness technique employed in third-person stories.

An example of this technique occurs in the opening paragraphs of the story. Look at the example below, noticing how the stream of consciousness technique is employed in the third-person form:

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father.

Ultimately, "Eveline" also explores and rejects the social and religious norms of Dublin culture, but Joyce's style is what really brings out the Modernism in this story.

James Joyce's "Eveline" evinces aspects of Modernism with a theme about social conditions, the internal monologue, and the open-ending. As one of the stories from The Dubliners, "Eveline" reflects the Irish social condition in which Catholicism dominates the actions and thoughts of individuals to the point of repression.  Eveline passes up a romantic relationship for the promises she has made to her dying mother and to the Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, whose portrait hangs on the wall, blessing the house.  Her indecisiveness that leads her to remain is indicated in her interior monologue in which she engages in self debate, asking herself if it is wise to have agreed to leave home; she wonders what "they will say of her in the Stores" and what it will be like to live in a distant country and "explore another life with Frank"; then, she hopes that Frank will "save her" from her abusive life at home with her father.  Finally, however, on the day of her arranged departure, Eveline experiences the Joycean paralysis as she struggles with her sense of duty and desire for happiness. Yet, the ending is unresolved as "her eyes gave him [Frank] no sign of love or farewell or recognition," so Joyce leaves the open ending to symbolic interpretation by the reader, a certain Modernist technique.