An Encounter Themes

The narrator of “An Encounter,” an unnamed young boy, begins the story by describing the pretend, Wild-West-inspired “Indian battles” that he and his friends stage every day after school. But after a time, he gets bored of pretending and longs for a real adventure. He and two of his friends—Mahony and Leo Dillon—plan to skip school, cross the river, and seek out the true adventure he believes he could never get by…

“An Encounter” features numerous older male characters with whom the narrator interacts. The male figures—the aggressive older boy Joe Dillon; the strict and haughty Father Butler at the narrator’s Jesuit-run school; and the strange old man whom the narrator and his friend Mahony encounter while playing hooky from school—each provide different, and often confusing, models of masculinity and sexuality to the young male narrator of the story. The narrator’s confusion at the visions of…

“An Encounter” takes place in Dublin, Ireland in the late 19th or early 20th century, when Ireland was still under British colonial control. British colonization exploited Ireland both politically and economically, and during Joyce’s lifetime, debate surged over whether Ireland could—or should—attain self-rule. Though it does so subtly, “An Encounter” directly engages with the complicated Irish social dynamics around colonization and power. Joe Dillon reads Wild West stories and convinces his friends to pretend to…

Joyce believed that Catholic and English political interests vying for control of Ireland and the Irish people had left the country in a state of “paralysis” leading to an overall cultural decay. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, England’s subjugation of Ireland left it an impoverished country financially and culturally: it’s native language was dying, and it had endured famine and economic decline with little aid. Ireland possessed a long history of failed…