James Joyce seemed to be onto it too, though he dramatized it in fiction, rather than philosophy. In his short story Eveline, a young woman who is planning to escape the drudgery of her life in Dublin, where she cares for her boorish but widowed father (in the home where she and her brothers grew up), decides at the last moment to stay behind, and continue the life she knows, however dull and obligatory she finds it, rather than board a ship to Buenos Aires with her adventurous beloved, a sailor named Frank who calls her “Poppens,” takes her to the theater, and is able to make her laugh. In the last lines of the story, as Frank cries to her from the gangway, “Come! Eveline! Evvy!” and beholds her with pained astonishment, she stands behind the railing and says nothing, but only sets “her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal,” while “her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.”