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The narrator and Mahony are approached by an unnamed old man towards the end of their adventure. The narrator is initially perplexed by the old man’s odd ways but he soon realizes that he is a sinister and perverted individual who frightens the narrator so much that he is paralyzed in place and unable to escape. The man’s conversation starts out innocently enough, asking the boys if they have read various authors, but he becomes more and more inappropriate and threatening. He begins fixating on women and catalogs the different seductive parts of the female anatomy, then reveals his predatory nature by displaying a preference for young girls and repeatedly asking the two young boys if they have girlfriends. Most concerningly, he walks away from the narrator and Mahony and, it’s implied, pleasures himself at a distance that the boys would nonetheless be able to see before returning to describe his fantasy of whipping Mahony for misbehaving. This predatory, violent, and sadistic man represents the foe that the narrator has the opportunity to vanquish on his hero’s journey. However, he is ultimately unable to do so and, through the narrator’s paralysis, Joyce implies that real adventures are nothing like what happens in fiction.
