James Joyce's Eveline touches on themes of helplessness, expectation and gender roles present in a poor Irish family throughout its narrative. The narrative focuses on the perspective of Eveline, the dutiful daughter of an abusive widower. She is the eldest daughter and tried to keep the promise she made to her mother when she was on her deathbed. He considers it his duty to keep his family together after his mother's death. She feels she has to fill her mother's roles while still being a daughter. She is melancholy about how her city seems to be changing even as her life seems to be at a standstill. He knows that everything changes. She and her siblings are getting older, as is her father, and she feels her family would fall apart if she wasn't there to keep it functional. She doesn't see her family as something strong enough to withstand difficult times, instead she feels like they are slowly aging and decaying around her. Her family was initially large, happy, and robust, but with the deaths of her mother and Earnest, and the estrangement of Harry, she has become a sickly aging shadow of her former self. Weak, alien and almost defenseless. No matter how much effort Eveline makes to keep him alive, her father tells her that she doesn't have the right mindset to do so. He tells her that her efforts help the streets more than help the family and that all it does is "squander" the family's resources. Eveline's family is a practical definition of the antonyms of "big" and "strong," tragically trying to remain traditional and proving dysfunctional in trying. Joyce knows that families need more than the traditional rule of law to succeed. He understands that families can still function poorly when their members continue to support each other. It shows that the efforts of one person in a family cannot keep a family standing. Eveline's family was clearly plagued by instability – in the traditional Irish sense – and power dynamics, malign responsibilities and lack of real communication hinder the titular character's every effort to keep her family from dying out. This shows that he is unable to stop him without support and attempting to do so will ultimately kill him