Barthes' Five Codes and the Theme of Escape in Joyce and Hemingway: A Comparative Study of Eveline and The Killers

Abstract

This paper conducts a comparative structural analysis of James Joyce’s Eveline and Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers through the lens of Roland Barthes’ Five Narrative Codes Hermeneutic, Proairetic, Semantic, Symbolic, and Cultural. By decoding the stories’ narrative mechanisms, the study reveals how both authors intricately construct the theme of escape not as an act of liberation but as a space of tension, paralysis, and existential ambiguity. Joyce’s Eveline portrays escape as a psychological struggle bound by gender, memory, and cultural obligation, while Hemingway’s The Killers renders escape futile against the backdrop of stoic fatalism and suppressed emotion. Both narratives resist closure, relying on withheld information, symbolic oppositions, and culturally embedded meanings to frame their protagonists’ dilemmas. Barthes’ framework allows us to interpret not only what the characters do or fail to do, but how the very form and structure of narrative reflects deeper ideological forces. This analysis contributes to a richer understanding of modernist fiction by revealing how narrative form encodes the inescapability of modern existence.