Eveline: moving forward

Eveline: moving forward

  Everybody has their own habit. Someone might bite their nails till it bleeds, shake their legs, or wake up automatically at 6’o clock without the help of alarm bell. No matter what impact they have on you – negative or positive – there is one common ground that all habits hare: they are extremely hard to get rid of. In my case, I failed to fix my habit of biting my finger even though I tried for more than 5 years. It seems like we are so much used to them that it just became a part of ourselves. If not about habit, changing something big in life is not an easy decision to make in most cases.

  In the novel Eveline, the main protagonist Eveline also has a dilemma between the old and the new. At home, she takes care of her sister and drunk, abusive father to keep the promise with her mother, who is no longer alive, to maintain the family as long as possible. At the same time, she falls in love with the man named Frank, who promised Eveline a better life in a better place.

  Eveline’s original life with her family is not free enough due to the spatial and temporal limitations she is placed under the responsibility of taking care of her family. However, she gradually gets afraid of the fact that she might lose control over her monotonous life and starts to feel the need to take her life into her own hands; she needs freedom. Therefore, Eveline tries to pursue it by moving overseas to the new place with her lover Frank.

  However, in the moment of departure, she gets paralyzed and finds it impossible to leave with Frank. What was the thing that put on the brakes to her first step towards freedom? In order to move away from the life she is destined to live, she needs to cut the ties she holds with her family. However, her pursuit of freedom and love was not strong enough to abandon the attachment to her family. Or it was not enough to win the comfort of a familiar environment and the fear of encountering the new world.

As a KMLA student who has only 270 days left for leaving the school, I could totally sympathize with Eveline’s fear of facing the drastic change. For me, KMLA is a harsh and cruel place which requires heavy responsibilities, burdens with unbearable tasks, and imposes to follow old rules and thoughts – which is too much for teenage students who are not fully mature yet to manage them all. For those years, I often get depressed and stressed out because of the continuum of joyless and aimless days at school and desperately shout out for ‘빠졸답(fast graduation is the answer)’, waiting for the day of freedom.   

  However, now I know that if I really stand in front of the boat that will lead me out of the school, and it is just about to depart, I will certainly get paralyzed in front of it as Eveline did.

  I easily get oblivious about the weight of the name ‘adult’. Although I had so hard time for three years in school, I cannot believe that graduation and becoming an adult will set me free from the pain and suffering. Adulthood will indeed enable me to access a much broader world and give me a greater degree of freedom. I will be able to drink, smoke, drive, watch over 19 contents, earn money, etc. However, these cost a huge responsibility. I should be responsible for our own actions and decisions because the school and parents will no longer be able to look after us. I should stand alone to find a solution or take action to deal with the problems whose scale is incomparable with the ones I’ve gone through during teenage years.

  Also, as the decision of Eveline to move to Buenos Aires is not made by her own but mostly influenced by Frank, the freedom obtained by graduation is also not chosen by my free will. In other words, I am being thrown to the society at once because school simply finished their three years of duty to take care of me as a student.

  Change requires great courage, and freedom that seems to be given by the change might require much more responsibility as a pay. This makes both me and Eveline get paralyzed in front of the change in our life. However, the change will get inevitable as we carry on our lives. Also, it is necessary to move a step forward and expand a horizon. Although feel uncertain, we should practice and prepare ourselves to undergo greater progress.