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A Young Boy’s Coming-of-Age
“An Encounter” is an adventure story, but it can also be classified as a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age narrative that follows a young protagonist on their intellectual and moral journey from childhood to young adulthood. When the story opens, the narrator is a young boy who dreams about being a hero in an adventure story as a way to cope with this uninspiring, monotonous life as a Dublin schoolboy. No longer content with simply reading Wild West and detective fiction or playing pretend in the backyard with his friends, the narrator decides to embark on a quest that will ultimately transform him from a sheltered young boy into a knowledgeable young man. This transformation technically does occur, just not in the way that the narrator envisioned. The narrator is initially filled with optimism as he departs for his adventure. However, he is repeatedly met with reality-based disappointments as opposed to fantastical excitement. He is not even able to vanquish the only real foe that he comes across on his epic quest because the old man’s cyclical speech and strange demeanor disarms the narrator into a stupor. The narrator did not transform into the dashing hero that he clearly wanted to become. However, his unsupervised experiences in the uninspiring Dublin streets mark his first genuine entrance into the real world—the first step on any coming-of-age journey.
The Desire for Escape
The characters in Dubliners may be citizens of the Irish capital, but many of them long for escape and adventure in other countries and the young narrator of “An Encounter” is no exception. His longings, however, are never actually realized—also the case for all of the other Dubliners protagonists who dream of adventure and escape on foreign shores. The narrator of “An Encounter” is obsessed with adventure stories. Specifically, he is obsessed with reading Wild West stories and American detective fiction. It is important to note that an overseas setting is an integral component to both of these genres. The narrator is not simply consuming adventure fiction—he is reading stories and playing pretend games that take him far away from the constricting hold of Dublin. The narrator makes this explicitly clear towards the start of the story, when he explains that the adventure fiction or, as he calls them, “chronicles of disorder,” open “doors of escape” that break the narrator out of the restricting and deadening routine of Catholic school. Unfortunately for the narrator, his schoolboy yearning for escape and Wild West excitement is relegated to the imagination and to the confines of Dublin—at no point does the narrative imply that he will ever really travel abroad and become an adventure hero. In fact, the text implies the exact opposite; the inability to actually escape from Dublin’s clutches defines most of the protagonists’ narratives in Dubliners.
Colonization
Joyce wrote “An Encounter” and the fourteen other short stories in Dubliners to offer a realistic depiction of what life was like for the Irish middle class in the early twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, many of the short stories, such as “The Sisters” and “Two Gallants,” include references and allusions to Great Britain’s rule over Ireland. This is the case because the Irish fight for independence had reached new heights during this period of history. While some are more obvious than others, many events in “An Encounter” allude to colonization. For instance, the story contains many moments that pit the Irish Catholics and the British-sympathizing Protestants against each other such as Mr. Butler’s disdain for the British-funded National schools and the poor children who taunt Mahony because they think that he is a Protestant. The most important allusion to colonization is also the most subtle. Joe Dillon’s love for Wild West fiction causes him to orchestrate mock “cowboy and Indian” battles with the neighborhood boys in his garden. His games draw parallels between the people of Dublin and the Indigenous people of North America because both groups were subjected to oppressive colonization at the hands of a powerful nation. Joyce notably sides with the colonized as opposed to the colonizers; he has Joe Dillon, the neighborhood leader, choose to be an Indigenous person during the boys’ games, and the narrator’s observation that Joe’s side always wins represents the Irish people’s desire to ultimately liberate themselves from British rule.
