An Encounter

"An Encounter"
Author	James Joyce
Country	Ireland
Language	English
Genre(s)	short story
Published in	Dubliners
Publication type	Collection
Media type	Print
Publication date	1914
Preceded by	""The Sisters""
Followed by	""Araby""

An Encounter is a short story by James Joyce. It is second in a collection of Joyce's short stories called Dubliners.

The story

The story involves a boy, the narrator, and his friend, Mahony, taking a day off from school and going to the shore, to seek adventure in their otherwise dull lives. As the narrator says, "The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad."

The episode revolves around their trip and the people that they see. There are enormous social events that the boys witness, and the narrator in an act of maturity, seems to at least be able to notice the situations. For example, the boys are mistaken for Protestants by some local children. The narrator also notices that many of the children are "ragged" and extremely poor. Near the end, the boys are approached by an older man who gives them an odd feeling. Previously, it seems to the reader that the man had been 'sizing them up' and then began to talk of mundane subjects, such as Sir Walter Scott and young sweethearts. At one point, the man excuses himself and it is implied that he masturbates before returning to the boys. He then begins a drawn-out monologue on the subject of whipping and other such corporal punishment. Deeply unsettled, the narrator looks to his friend Mahony for comfort though he admits to harbouring negative feelings about him.

There is no textual proof that the man does in fact masturbate: all is left to the reader to judge — an example of Joyce's use of Gnomon, an avoiding form often encountered in Joyce's writing, most succinctly expounded in Stephen's remark in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that "absence is the highest form of presence". This particular "avoidance" helped in the book's original publication: on a first reading, the publisher had refused the manuscript on the grounds, as he saw it, of the old man's depraved behaviour. Only when Joyce persuaded him that no explicit behaviour is in fact portrayed was Dubliners accepted for publication.

All in all the tale tells of society itself, between the Catholic and Protestant violence, Irish poverty, lecherous old men, foreigners and the schooling of boys at the time period. The boys encounter all this in this short story, giving us a broad view of Dublin itself.

Online texts

• An Encounter – From the book Dubliners.