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Routine is constricting.
Like many stories in Dubliners, the events of “An Encounter” suggest that although people yearn for escape and adventure, routine is inevitable, and new experiences, when they do come, can be profoundly disturbing. Restrictive routines and the repetitive, mundane details of everyday life mark the lives of Joyce’s Dubliners and trap them in circles of frustration, restraint, and violence. The narrator and his friends play games about the Wild West to disrupt the rote activity of school, and venture into Dublin for the same reason. However, the narrator and his friends never fully reach escape. Though the narrator bemoans the restraint of school, his attempt to avoid it leads him to the discomforting encounter with an old man whose fixation on erotic novels, girlfriends, and whipping casts him as a pervert. This unnerving figure serves as an embodiment of routine and suggests that repetition exists even within strange new experiences. The man walks in circles, approaching and passing the boys before retracing his steps to join them. He mimics this action in his speech by repeating points already raised and lingering on topics uncomfortable for the narrator. Although these boys seek an escape, they must suffer monotony, in the form of an excruciating afternoon with a frightening man.
Life does not always live up to our fantasies.
“An Encounter”’s young, unnamed narrator has a lot of romanticized expectations at the start of the text. Unfortunately for him, he will learn over the course of the story that real life does not always adhere to our daydreams. He first sees the mock battles that he and his friends stage at Joe Dillon’s house as an immersive escape from the drudgery of school, but he ultimately becomes bored of their play and comes to regard it as constricting a routine as academics. He devours American detective fiction, in which the hero is presented with “unkempt fierce and beautiful girls,” but he does not have any romantic prospects of his own. He is excited to play the protagonist and embark on an epic quest with his friends through the streets of Dublin, but most of their day is uneventful. He wishes to be a hero but he is the one who needs to be rescued from the verbal clutches of the old man. In this regard, the narrator of “An Encounter” can be compared to the narrator of “Araby,” another short story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, because both narrators are young boys whose childish fantasies are destroyed by the practical adult world. Through these two protagonists, Joyce offers a pessimistic view of childhood because he essentially argues that childhood is an extended fantasy that needs to be destroyed in order for a person to enter adulthood.
Conventional masculinity can be toxic.
Joyce surrounds the narrator with many characters that display conventionally masculine traits such as Joe Dillon, Father Butler, Mahony, and the old man. However, none of these characters are depicted in a particularly flattering light despite their adherence to gender roles. Joe Dillon is athletic and invents adventurous games for all the boys to play but he abandons the other boys to become a priest, and the narrator is eventually bored by the games that Joe invented. Father Butler is firm and commanding, but the narrator and the rest of the schoolboys dislike him and do not have any respect for him. Mahony is heroic and tough but he is also not very bright, and the narrator finds him irritating. The old man is perhaps the most important example because the reader is able to witness, in the same instance the narrator realizes it, that the old man’s traditionally masculine interest in sex and women is rooted in perversion. All of these characters paint an ultimately negative picture of conventional masculinity which the narrator is unequipped to handle or fully process. This is particularly concerning because, as a young boy on the cusp of adolescence, the narrator could use a positive male role model to guide him from childhood to adulthood.
