The Pigeon House Symbol Analysis

When the narrator decides to skip school, he plans to go see the Pigeon House. The Pigeon house was a building whose history encompasses many different uses. That fact, along with the detail that he and Mahony don’t actually make it to the Pigeon House, ties into Joyce’s ideas about Irish cultural decay and paralysis. The Pigeon House started out as a lodging house for workers building Dublin’s Great South Wall, then became a restaurant and hotel for travelers arriving in Dublin Bay. After the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Pigeon House became a military fort for Anglo-Irish forces, before finally undergoing its final transformation into a sewage processing facility and power generating station. The Pigeon House’s transformation from a port for foreign sailors—adventurers—to a sewage processing and power plant after a period of military takeover echoes Joyce’s ideas about English colonization’s impact on Ireland. If the narrator considered the Pigeon House a symbol for adventure, like the green eyes he hoped to find in the foreign sailors around him, and if he had actually completed his journey, he would have been greeted with a symbol of Irish decay: literal sewage.

However, the Pigeon House was also an electrical power plant. Considered in a positive light, the Pigeon House is also associated with light, and its name is associated with the Holy Spirit, which often appears as a dove in its physical form. These aspects of the Pigeon House invite the reader to wonder whether there might be hope for greater Irish renewal despite the narrator’s personal failure and disappointment in his adventure.