An Encounter

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1913

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Themes

Wanderlust

It is no surprise, perhaps, that the narrator’s prime motivation in “An Encounter” is wanderlust. James Joyce himself had only recently left Ireland for good when the story was written. One can easily imagine a young Joyce longing “to run away to sea on one of those big ships” as the stability of his childhood slowly eroded (13).

Wanderlust is a truly universal theme, unbeholden to time, place, or situation. However, leaving one’s home in the late 19th and early 20th century presented a significantly different prospect than it does today. Ireland has seen massive waves of emigration over the centuries, the largest beginning in the 1840s during the Great Famine. The island’s population has only recently returned to pre-famine levels and for over a century was one of the few places on Earth whose modern-day population was lower than its population in the first half of the 19th century. This shared reality, the mass movement of a people to far-flung corners of the globe, colors much of Irish literature, culture, and social identity even today.

Ireland is an island, so the only way to get anywhere else is by ship. The narrator’s wanderlust would hardly be stoked by a train ride to the rural interior of the country. When Mahony suggests running away, there’s a moment of possibility, a branch into an alternate reality where the two do board a ship and are never seen or heard from again.

Instead of crossing the Irish Sea, they cross the River Liffey. Their wanderings ultimately lead them to a field where they experience a different kind of adventure into the unknown than they were expecting. Rather than find themselves in a far-off land, the boys find themselves in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable situation. This is a fitting twist to the theme. Wanderlust was a major element of the Romanticism that Joyce eschewed so fervently. It would have been extremely out of character for him to write a simple tale about a young boy’s desire for adventure in a foreign land. Joyce was much more interested in internal discoveries. The narrator explores Dublin street by street, bridge by bridge, and river by river, until he uncovers an element of human nature that he had never encountered. The story still contains all the danger and drama of a typical Romantic wanderlust tale but in a much more personal setting.

Social Stratification

The island of Ireland has suffered roughly 800 years of colonial occupation by their English neighbors. The clearest indication of this history today is the partition of the island into the 26 counties that make up the Republic of Ireland, a sovereign nation, and the six counties that make up Northern Ireland, politically part of the United Kingdom. When Dubliners was published in 1914, however, the entire island was still under British rule. A version of the same class system that has ruled England for centuries was enforced in Ireland, but with additional rungs attached to the bottom of the ladder for the Indigenous Irish. Dublin, once the “second city” of the empire and a major trade hub in its own right, was reduced to a provincial outpost by the time Joyce began writing his 15 stories.

Social stratification permeated every aspect of Dublin life, including the arts. Joyce was strongly critical of the Celtic Revival that was popular around the time that he was writing Dubliners. Readers at the time would have picked up on many of the nuanced references to social class in Joyce’s stories. Two of the clearest in “An Encounter” involve references to National Schools, the first made by Father Butler when chastising Leo Dillon and the second made by the narrator when the old man asks if Mahony is whipped often at school. National Schools, which had been set up by the British to educate the Irish youth in a way that was acceptable to the Empire, were blamed for all manner of problems in Joyce’s time. Irish nationalists criticized them for stamping out the Irish language in students. Both Irish Catholics and Protestants were opposed to the multi-denominational approach they took. Members of the middle class felt that they did not prepare their children well enough for a successful career. For a boy like the narrator, a middle-class student at a Catholic-run school, being associated with a National School was a terrible insult. Another reference to social status in the text is in the boys’ name-calling of the girls they meet during their day off of school. They refer to the girls as “ragged,” most likely commenting on their clothing or general appearance in comparison to their own. Oblivious to the hurtful nature of such comments and the complexity behind characters experiencing poverty, the boys simply see people who seem less wealthy as below them.

Religious Division

As is often the case when a minority group is given power and prominence over a majority group, it can be hard to separate religious concerns from political and social concerns. In Ireland today, Catholicism is often paired with nationalism, while Protestantism is often paired with Unionism, or support for the current partitioning of the island. This isn’t exactly the case, though, and when Dubliners was written it was even less so.

What is simplified today as a division between Protestants and Catholics ignores the various Protestant denominations historically living in Ireland, as well as the different levels of cache that various Catholic institutions have often held. In fact, prior to the 1800s, setting up the political divide in Ireland as “Protestant versus Catholic” wouldn’t have made much sense at all. Among Irish Catholics there were also significant divisions. Catholic-run schools were preferred by middle-class families, and we find the narrator of “An Encounter” attending one of these schools. Even though Joyce was deeply critical of the Church itself, he seems to have at least appreciated the education that he received from the Jesuits. He also makes sure that the narrator has a kind word for Mrs. Dillon, a woman who attends mass every single morning. He’s a bit less kind to her two sons, one of whom is likely going to join the priesthood.

When the “ragged” children call the boys a name for Protestants, this is noteworthy because, in calling them something other than they are, the strangers are feeding into the boys’ sense of freedom and self-abandonment. This feeling of freedom is short-lived as it is followed by the narrator’s nerve-wracking encounter with the old man. However, religion plays a major role in how these characters see themselves and their place in the world. It is just as much a marker of identity in the Dublin of this world as it would have been in the author’s personal experiences.