W. H. Auden - The unknown citizen

S. Beckett - Waiting for Godot

H. Pinter - The Caretaker (The job offer)

T.S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock / The Waste Land (The Burial of the Dead) / The Hollow Men

Eveline - James Joyce

James Joyce’s “Eveline,” focuses on a character of the same name amidst an emotional turmoil. This story could be deemed a love tale which involves Eveline who struggles to remove herself from the strong ties to her family and follow her love, Frank, to Buenos Aires. Joyce uses literary elements such as setting, symbols, and themes that help convey Eveline’s emotional struggle.

This story begins in a town in Ireland with the introduction of family characters. Family seems to be a strong theme in Joyce’s writing. This theme is evident when Eveline stays home and takes over the motherly duties in the household as a teen after a promise was made to her dying mother. Death plays a major role in this story as the author points out that many of Eveline’s friends and family are said to have died at some point. Symbolism such as dust collecting around the house and the aged yellow painting of Mary Margaret Alocoque, a French nun, enable the reader to get a sense of the death and loneliness surrounding Eveline. There are several issues presented by Joyce that give rise to Eveline’s internal conflict of breaking the promise to her mother and leaving with Frank. One major problem is that the family is very poor and money is a very precious resource in their lives. Eveline expresses the importance of money when she is walking to the market with her purse clasped close to her body almost as if to protect it as though it were her very own life. Her family’s poverty is apparent when Frank takes her to the theater and she expresses her delight with the seats Frank has purchased because she has been accustomed to sitting in the back row due to her inability to purchase better seats.

To Eveline, Frank represents a new and exciting lifestyle that she has not had the opportunity to experience after taking over the mother role. Her routine, mundane lifestyle that Eveline has led appears to be comforting to her because of its stability, whereas being with Frank is something new and spontaneous. Perhaps Eveline is not so much in love with Frank as she is with the opportunity to embark on a new lifestyle that contradicts everything she has known and become accustomed to. When the time comes for Eveline to make her life altering decision she falters. Frank is urging her to go as they are at the station and Eveline becomes frozen in a state of emotional paralysis, unable to make a decision. Again, Joyce uses symbolism when Eveline grips onto the handrails that lead down the steps to her new life. The handrails represent stability and control. They represent the life she has always known and the comfort that it provides. James Joyce tells us that Eveline lacks the strength to make her own decision. Therefore, she remains dysfunctional due to her fear of failure, promise to her mother, or guilt that she faces for leaving her family behind. Joyce is able to exaggerate all of these feelings inside Eveline primarily because of his writing style. The use of these literary elements gives a more intense understanding of the emotional quarrel that Eveline is forced to deal with.

R. Burns - To a Mouse / To a Louse

Robert Burns' "To a Mouse" (1785) is a deeply poetic monologue of a young man who accidently overturns the soil of a mouse's nest. Emotionally surrendering to the pitiful scene, Burns' narrator succumbs to the weight of his past failures and fears for the future and expresses himself in a profoundly poignant soliloquy. One of the lines, now a famous quote, "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / gang aft agley" (38-39), is perhaps one of the most profound quotes of Scottish, and indirectly, European and American literature. Burns' poem, in its intimate solidarity with all men, touches the reader in ways few poetic works ever really can. To understand what Burns' "To a Mouse" genuinely means to a reader is to know their darkest, innermost secrets and most remorseful memories of regret. It is this intimacy that gives Burns' "To a Mouse" its intensity.Scottish writer, Robert Burns (1759 - 1796), was an accomplished and very well known Scottish poet whose works went well beyond the borders of Scotland. Often writing in English as well as a light Scot-English dialect, his writing was readily accessible to readerships throughout Europe and North America. "To a Mouse," would be an example of one of Burns' 'Scot-English' works, with its deep, predominantly English verse accented with some Scottish vocabulary and culture-typical idioms. Often, when an English speaker is reading Burns, they must imagine a smooth rhythmic Scottish accent, and try to avoid toiling over any literal meanings of English words spelled in Scottish dialect. Burns must be 'felt'; allowing the words to flow uninterrupted so that the greater theme can more freely reveal itself. In the case of Burns' "To a Mouse," the message is a theme that is absolutely worth the relationship.
The first six stanzas of Burns' "To a Mouse" is a heart felt description and apology to a little 'mousie' who has had her nest destroyed by the narrator who was plowing his field. With all her work destroyed by the blade of the farmer's plow, the little mouse's fate of dying in the harsh December weather is assured. The narrator tries to tell the terrified little mouse that he had meant her no harm and, that though she stole the odd piece of corn, he never actually held any malice towards her for doing so. He goes on to say that in many ways he was glad to share for the sake of the little creature, and felt that man's progress has already broken too many of God's natural bonds. These bonds are the connections that they as fellow mortal beings shared against the suffering and cruel interventions of chance and fate on Earth.
It is here, as Burn's narrator pours his heart out to this pitiful little 'mousie,' that the narrator seems to be undone by what has happened to her. In the lines "The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley, / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, / For promis'd joy!" (38-41), he tries to explain that no matter how well thought out or how well intentioned our plans may be, even the best of them can be ruined by a simple turn of luck; the mouse's nest, a careful and diligent construction of a summer's labor, was just as easily destroyed as any house or farm ever built by man. For our labors, our most earnest hopes, Burn's narrator mourns and describes their returns of "grief an' pain, / For promised joy!" (40-41).It's this turn in the course of the poem's theme after the seventh stanza, Burns' full intentions coming to light, that the narrator reveals why he is talking to this frightful mouse in such a pathetic manner. He see's in the mouse a fellow victim of the hand of fate, and cannot but feel empathy for her loss. The narrator speaks as if he himself has recently lost a dream that he too saw hewn in half by some uncontrollable force of destiny. As he talks to the mouse, it seems fresh in his mind as the describes the past as a stinging recollection of failures; "Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! / The present only toucheth the: / But Ouch! I backward cast my e'e, / On prospect drear! / An' forward, though' I canna see, / I guess and fear!" (Line 42-47). As many who have suffered failure and loss, Burns' narrator, or perhaps Burns himself, expresses jealousy for the mouse's ability to live perpetually in the present without a past to rush painfully back into her mind whenever she remembers. Burns' narrator, in this distant forlorn monologue, describes how he can only guess what the future may hold, and fears for its uncertain outcome. It seems that Burns' narrator has been wrestling with this repressed pain and worry for some time, and now, only with the emotional catalyst of the mouse's disaster is he forced face them. He somehow feels obligated to apologize to a little creature that has no understanding of what he's trying to say, and whose death is all but assured thanks to his ignorant action. Yet, in some metaphysical metaphor, Burns manages to turn the mouse into a tiny helpless symbol of ourselves, terrified at a world that could so easily destroy us at any moment, and make us wonder if God feels the same way we do when he stands over disaster.