Beautiful Rachel

 Rating: 9.0/10  The story 'Eveline' well shows the inner conflict of many women in early twentieth-century especially in Dubliners. Eveline Hill, who represents many women at that time, conflicts between her domestic life and her desire to go abroad. She first wanted to go Buenos Ires with her lover, Frank, but soon realizes the promise she had made with her dead mom and refuses Frank's calling. She's tied up in the past and gave up her desire. She only thinks about happy memories with her dad, which is clearly less than his cruelty. Most women at that time, would have act like Eveline. They are powerless and too faithful for their family. It was a 'moralful' story that made me think again about women's earlier life. 

 Rating: 8/10  In Araby, narrator's love toward Mangan's sister ends with a moment of epiphany. The narrator realized that his love toward sister is only a useless wish. His failed love shows the people experience frustrated love through their life. We probably all have similar experience with the narrator. Sometimes we love so hardly, and sometimes we broke up because of a minor thing. Joyce tried to say that these are so natural experiences. Daily life like his uncle, train, and the women in the market could be the obstacles for the love.   I liked the story because I also had a similar experience. I felt sympathy to the narrator whose love ended sadly like mine. I loved someone blindly but suddenly realized that it's useless. This story made me to think about my failed love again. 

 The sisters-James Joyce(1914) rating 6/10 Among the previous stories, I think this story is the hardest one to understand. It is said that the topic of the story is 'paralysis' that shows paralyzed Irish culture. Father Flynn reflected the paralyzed Catholic Church, which was one of the reasons why Irish culture was paralyzed. The story ends with the sentence"..that there was something gone wrong with him.", and it shows that the priest had a mental problem before he dies. Inappropriate relationship between the boy and the priest shows the paralyzation of the priest, church and culture. There are some other themes that reflects paralysis through Father Flynn such as his death or decayed teeth.  I liked how Joyce reflected paralysis through the priest, but I don't like Joyce's writing method. He left the story too open-ended. It would've been better if he gave some clear hint about the ending so that we can at least predict one integrated conclusion.  Over...

Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov (1898) Rating: 8.5/10 "Behind the door of every contented , happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people~"  This phrase is basically what Chekhov is trying to say through this story. I couldn't 100% agree with Ivan's saying, but I liked the theme of this story. The part that Ivan said "there is no happiness" seems contradict, because even Ivan looks happy when he swims in a river. However, it is true that people these days sometimes forget how we are enjoying this freedom. They just focus on their own happiness and ignore others' pain, like Nikolay did.   When I first read this story, I thought Ivan was too pessimistic. People tend to focus on my happiness, not other's pain behind the happiness. However, I realized that the happiness is from the invisibility or silence of those who are unhappy. There are lots of people behind ou...