An Encounter Summary & Analysis

Leo’s Latin translation links the Catholic Church to the general feeling of boredom with routine and repetition that the narrator feels throughout the story. By translating Latin, Leo does not even think for himself, only repeats what someone else has already said—and although Ireland’s main colonial opponents at the turn of the 20th century were the English, the fact that middle-class Irish schoolboys learned Latin reminds the reader that the Romans colonized Ireland first. This detail makes the story’s colonial backdrop even more complex: while the Catholic Church was often supportive of Irish Nationalism, it, too, could repress the Irish people. And by reading older books that venerate colonial powers, the Roman History that Leo reads ends up subtly working against the cause of Irish freedom (as does learning Latin rather than the native Irish language that was in the process of dying out). Likewise, Father Butler’s quickness to punish Leo for reading for fun hints towards the parts of the boys’ Jesuit education that repress them rather than empower them. Father Butler’s sudden rage echoes Joe Dillon’s aggression. However, rather than inspire wildness and a sense of adventure like Joe did, Father Butler punishes unruliness and disobedience, enforcing the boys’ routine every day. Meanwhile, Butler’s words highlight the social and economic disparities between the middle- or upper-class Jesuits and the poorer Irish children who would have to attend the state-sponsored, multifaith National Schools. By shaming the boys for acting like National School boys, Father Butler deepens the divisions between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant in Ireland by passing on his biases to Ireland’s youngest minds. Finally, when the narrator sees the power that Father Butler has over Leo, Joyce suggests that the narrator’s waning interest in the Wild West is rooted in the narrator’s new recognition that, in practice, power and aggressive masculinity can quash a wild or unruly spirit and mold it into living a repetitive and obedient life. Father Butler’s rebuke is the first major force that disappoints the narrator’s hope for adventure in life.

The narrator’s returning desire for adventure suggests that, despite Father Butler’s efforts, the narrator has not succumbed to expectations that he be obedient. That Leo remains scared of being punished, though, foreshadows the first flaw in the narrator’s plan. By skipping school, the narrator’s plan is both an adventure and a conscious break from his routine and from authority, a hint that there is hope for him to avoid the same paralysis that Joyce saw in many Irish people. But the history of the narrator’s destination, the Pigeon House, complicates his journey: the Pigeon House started out as construction workers’ lodging, and then became a hotel and restaurant for foreign sailors—in other words, a hub for adventurers. But the English made it into a military fort in the 18th century, and, at the time when “An Encounter” was set it was a sewage processing and power plant for the city. While the narrator does not indicate why he wants to go to the Pigeon House, its gradual decline from an adventuring hub connecting Ireland to the world to colonial military fort to literal sewage plant aligns with the overall sense of decay that Joyce felt Ireland was experiencing under English colonial rule. However, the Pigeon House also invites religious comparisons: its name evokes the common representation of the Holy Spirit as a dove, and the fact that the Pigeon House produces light for the city as well makes it not only a symbol of decay, but a symbol of hope and renewal.

When the narrator sleeps badly and Leo immediately bails on the plan, Joyce sets the scene for the coming adventure’s series of unexpected disappointments. But Mahony’s arrival with a slingshot sets an entirely different tone. Unlike Leo and the narrator, Mahony is traditionally-masculine, street-smart, and, based on his use of slang, lower-class (or at least not concerned about appearing lower-class). The slingshot sets Mahony apart from the narrator by revealing his greater inclination to violence and action, and indeed, Mahony gets the journey started by deciding to abandon Leo and treating Leo’s contributed money as forfeit.

Although Mahony gets the ball rolling on the trip, the fact that he immediately uses his slingshot to start trouble reinforces the idea that traditional masculinity only picks on the vulnerable: by chasing the ragged girls, Mahony not only derails the journey, but also invites conflict from the ragged boys who might otherwise have left he and the narrator alone. The detail that his slingshot is “unloaded” makes it a kind of phallic symbol that is all bark and no bite: while he can’t use it against the girls, he still wields it over them as a symbol of his aggression. By picking on children weaker than he is, Mahony unwittingly mimics Joe Dillon’s victories over opponents who had no power to win—and felt they had no power to change—the game. Meanwhile, the presence of the ragged boys and girls highlight how impoverished Dublin was at the turn of the 20th century compared to its neighbors, another sign of its decay and paralysis. Rather than move forward and lift up its most vulnerable citizens, Dublin remained stagnant under the same colonial control it had experienced for decades. When the ragged boys and girls call the narrator and Mahony “Swaddlers,” a pejorative slang term for Protestants, they highlight the existing divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland while also illuminating how class differences also create divisions among Catholics. When wealthy (or wealthier) Catholic Dubliners such as Mahony and Father Butler attack poorer Catholics (whether physically or verbally), it is even more difficult for the Irish to unify against the English, keeping them stuck in place. That the ragged boys and girls mistake Mahony for a Protestant also suggests that there are ways that the richer Catholics, for all their talk of Irish independence, are in fact complicit in Protestant political rule of Ireland.

As the boys fail to secure the Smoothing Iron for themselves, and as they are admonished for being in construction crews’ way, they face yet more disappointed expectations on their journey. When they vent by imagining Leo being punished at school, stuck in his usual routine, they further illuminate the Church’s tools for enforcing order and obedience. The detail that Leo will be punished “at three o’clock” carries religious implications since Jesus is said to have died on the cross at three o’clock. But even as the narrator and Mahony imagine Leo trapped in routine, they fall prey to routine themselves: watching the construction workers is just watching others’ daily routines. When they break for lunch, they only do so because they are copying the workers, suggesting that they fall in line with others’ routines even while they are on their adventure. While the narrator is having a new experience, the adventure he imagines of going out to sea is much more exciting to him than the adventure he is actually on. Once again, his expectations do not match reality.

As the narrator watches a sailor entertain a crowd, he becomes even more acutely aware of the fact that even new sights quickly become repetitive and disappointing. At this point in the story, the narrator’s overall boredom with what he sees stands in stark contrast with his expectations for a journey. Even the performing is literally doing a routine, repeating his act so that it just seems new for each set of passers-by. The narrator hopes to see a green-eyed sailor because, in Homer’s Odyssey, the war hero, sailor, adventurer, and traditionally-masculine archetype Odysseus is said to have green eyes. This hope emphasizes the narrator’s reliance on stories for his expectations of adventure, the consistent failure of reality to meet those expectations, and establishes green eyes as a symbol of adventure in the story.

The weather matches the boys’ mood and closes in on them, the heat and humidity slowing them down as they start to lose motivation to complete their trip. Once again, Mahony steers them off track by chasing a cat into a field, and the narrator’s overall inability to keep himself and Mahony focused and moving forces him to abandon reaching their final destination. Discouraged and exhausted by their experience of a “real” adventure, the boys sit down, and the weather once again mirrors their emotions as a cloud covers the sun and makes the day darker. Note also how this adventure to escape school must still abide by the routines of school—if they don’t get home when they would on a typical school day, they’ll get caught.

When the man enters the field and starts talking to the boys, the narrator’s assumptions that adventure will feel exciting and that dangers will be obvious start to go out the window. However, the details about the man’s advanced age and shabby suit suggest and foreshadow his internal moral decay. The narrator’s initial boredom with the man’s talk aligns with his overall sense of boredom on his adventure. But as a bookish older man, the man in the field at least presents a different image of masculinity than any the narrator has encountered before. Further, the writers the man mentions are all Irish, implying that he offers a connection to a successfully Irish cultural past.

The man tries to connect with the narrator by claiming him as a fellow “bookworm” and further implies that such bookishness offers a kind of serious masculinity in contrast to the aggressive “games” that Mahony plays. Yet the seemingly positive male role model that the older man seems to offer quickly starts to turn sour when he hints at the sexual content in some of his favorite books. In this moment the story’s tone shifts and there is a sense of uneasiness as well as boredom in the narrator’s emotions. On the one hand, the old man might simply be tactlessly looking for someone to talk to. But on the other hand, he might be singling the narrator out deliberately because of his difference from Mahony; a boy who prefers books to games might be easer to manipulate. While either seem possible at first, when the man smiles and reveals his mouth of rotting teeth, the signs of decay are so obvious that it is clear that the man poses a threat. While the adventure was disappointing compared to the narrator’s expectations before the man sat down, after the man smiles, it takes a dangerous and frightening turn, subverting his expectations in a new way.

When the man’s conversation narrows from vague sexual suggestions to more direct probing about “sweethearts,” Mahony’s version of masculinity better prepares him to handle the man than the narrator’s. By bragging about his “three totties,” Mahony once again fulfills the more traditional masculine role by projecting his sexual (or, in the case of boys as young as the narrator and Mahony, pseudo-sexual) prowess, and turns the question back on the man. By contrast, the narrator’s silence reveals how paralyzed he is by the confrontation and by his own unease—unease that Mahony does not appear to feel. Rather than face the man head-on like Mahony does, the narrator shrinks, failing to meet the expectations of a hero in the face of a possible threat.

The narrator’s mounting unease signals to the reader that his journey has veered into an unknown, dangerous aspect of his adventure—an adventure that is not at all like the one he had imagined. Instead of a positive masculine role model, the man now appears decidedly creepy as the narrator intuits that something is wrong with the way the man talks about young boys and their sweethearts. As the reality of the journey sidesteps the narrator’s expectations in new ways, the “adventure” aspect of it ramps up—but rather than face danger with excitement, the narrator is just afraid. His feelings fail to rise up to his ideas of heroes’ reactions to danger.

The man’s visual and auditory mismatch exacerbates the narrator’s sense that something is wrong: the man’s shabby suit and rotted teeth do not match his “good,” upper-class accent, nor does the perverted way he talks about girls. His masculine sexuality veers even further into the perverted. Rather than be secretly bookish and timid like the narrator or aggressive like Mahony and Joe Dillon, the man hides his wild, lawless, and perverted masculine sexuality behind an educated accent and lures the boys in with routine conversation before revealing his decayed morals. The narrator seems utterly unprepared for the danger he has found himself in. Unlike storybook heroes, the narrator is just a young boy with no clue how to react, so he just stays still.

The man’s repetitive speech, particularly the narrator’s observation that the man seems to have memorized what he was saying “by heart” echoes the earlier scene in which Leo Dillon messes up his Latin translation. With these details, the narrator and the reader gain insight into the fact that although the boys are unused to and unprepared for the man talking to them like this, for the man this interaction is just another part of his routine. The man’s circular way of speaking makes him seem “magnetised” in the narrator’s eyes, but the man can also be seen as paralyzed—if he is essentially reciting something he had memorized, he had to have learned it from somewhere, and although he may have invented it himself, the overall tone of paralysis and decay in the story suggests that the man’s perversions and decaying appearance may just be reflections of the backward, morally rotten landscape of 19th century Dublin. The Catholic Church’s repressive attitudes about sexuality may have contributed to the man’s descent into wild sexual perversion; if young boys are almost totally ignorant about sex, and it is spoken about as both something “obvious” and something “secret,” it follows that the man might be a product of his repressive landscape. If the narrator has no positive male role models, the old man might not have had any either, circling back to Joyce’s overall criticism of the social and moral decay in Dublin. As the man speaks, he seems to pass on his own sense of paralysis to the narrator, who simply stares at the ground silently and appears hypnotized by the man’s language. At this stage of the story, the narrator is trapped in a dangerous situation and unable to break himself out of it.

The man getting up and walking away provides the boys with a possible escape. But neither of them seize the opportunity, and it is unclear whether they are too afraid or too intrigued. The narrator begins to think like a hero in danger when he tells Mahony to give the man fake names. But the reader can see that the strategy is for nothing; the man doesn’t seem to care who the boys are, only that he has them stuck listening to him. The story strongly implies that the man walks off to masturbate at the end of the field, subjecting the boys to his perversions even from a distance. Masturbation itself suggests the idea of Dublin in decay; it reveals the man’s decaying morals and is a “non-productive” expression of sexuality. The narrator’s refusal to watch what the man is doing strikes a complex balance between paralysis, an inability to act, and a break from routine. By refusing to look, the narrator refuses the man what he wants. But his aims in looking away are ambiguous.

When the narrator doesn’t get up and run like Mahony, he once again fails to act like a hero would, even if that action means running away. Although Joyce’s understated writing style does not let the reader in on the narrator’s thought process, the reader can sense the narrator’s continuing sense of paralysis before danger.

Once the man starts talking about “whipping” boys, his sexuality fully encompasses both perversion and aggression, the same aggression that only picks on the more vulnerable. The old man initially seemed like a possible role model and a bridge to Ireland’s cultural past—but now his perversion makes clear that the rot in Ireland goes deeper, and there may not be any good male models or salvation in past cultural heights. Meanwhile, despite the narrator’s sense of imminent danger, his primary emotional response is to be offended when he feels he is being treated as lower-class. While the narrator’s conversations with Mahony reveal that the boys do get punished at school, the narrator gets bogged down in wanting to assert that he is more cultured than the “National School boys,” suggesting that he has taken Father Butler’s shaming to heart. By repeating the word “magnetised,” Joyce signals to the reader that the man’s fixation on young girls is not his only perversion: he is also sexually excited by beating boys. The talk about punishment that pervades the story combined with the detail about the man’s “good” accent suggests that this perversion, too, might be a product of his own upbringing in the repressive and punitive environment of Irish schools and society.

With the appearance of the old man’s green eyes, the narrator receives the signal he wanted that he was on an adventure. But the old man’s perversions by this point are so clear that the narrator also realizes in this moment that adventure in the real world is not as pretty or simple as stories make them seem; danger lurks where he least expected it and he is not at all equipped to deal with it. The man’s wildness is real, perverse, and violent, a far cry from Joe Dillon’s play-fighting, or Odysseus’s escapades.

The man’s focus on whipping boys who lie about having sweethearts seems to focus in particular on the narrator, who claimed not to have any sweethearts. Yet the narrator stays silent and still, once again failing to act even though the danger he is in becomes increasingly obvious. His confusion reveals how naïve he is about sexuality as the man works himself up once more by repeating phrases about whipping boys.

The man’s “pleading” tone and the sense that the man wants to be understood again signals that the man’s perversion may be a product of a repressive society that does not allow anyone to discuss or be understood regarding their thoughts about sex. But it also suggests that the man is seeking to connect with the narrator, and that hoped-for connection might involve whipping rather than conversation. Nonetheless the narrator continues to be under the spell of the man’s voice—he needs for the repetition of it to stop in order to break free.

The narrator’s escape is both bold compared to his previous inaction and disappointing in how delayed it is. Mahony has already made himself an “out,” and the narrator appears to lag far behind Mahony’s traditionally-masculine ability to act decisively under pressure. The narrator’s terror falls short of his own expectations of a heroic escape—but he still breaks out of the man’s trap.

Having to call Mahony’s alias twice reveals how poorly thought-out the narrator’s plan to use fake names is, making his failure as the leader of an adventure painfully evident. And as Mahony runs to the narrator, the narrator instantly recognizes the heroic qualities in Mahony that do not exist in himself. The narrator’s guilt at disliking Mahony and disappointment in himself marks his coming-of-age as he learns to adjust his expectations of himself, others, and the world around him.