"An Encounter" deals with the very same day that the narrative voice has just lived through. The "I" had played truant from school that morning with his friend Mahoney. The young lads go seeking adventure only to find an old pervert with "bottle green eyes". "Green" is the colour of the eyes the boy had expected the "mysterious" Norwegian sailors on the magic wharves of Dublin to have. It is also the colour of Ireland, "the emerald isle". These Norwegians had represented high adventure to the youth's imagination. Therefore, when we learn that the "shabbily dressed" man they meet is the only person with green eyes in the entire tale, we are led to conclude that "adventure", in Joyce's Dublin, is, in cold fact, only comparable to an encounter with an old sexual deviant. Paralysis also puts in a fleeting appearance in the way the man's mind goes "round and round in the same orbit" while making no progress whatever. In this circular but static movement, we further note the resemblance of such a thought process to the gnomon on a sun-dial. Paralysis had also been present earlier in the story when the boys stand "immobilized" and impede the progress of the seamen on the quays. As for the sun itself, throughout the story, it is behind clouds, casting but a shadow, like the very gnomon it should be aiding to mark progress.

Everything in the tale seems to be decaying. Even the biscuits in the shop window are "musty" and they "lay bleaching", like some corpse in the dark Liffey waters. This would also give them a colour similar to that of the pervert's moustache which is "ashen grey". Simony seems not to take part in "An Encounter" in any literal way though, taken in a wide sense as meaning any corruption of what should be holy, it could apply to the man's attempted corruption of youth. Still, as we follow the narrator from playing Indians and his revealing that he is often afraid, through a brief episode at school to his playing truant and that final escape from the man, we might wonder whether the "encounter" of the title merely refers to the encounter with the strange man or whether it might not rather be a teenager's encounter with the greater outside world and with himself.

At the opening, it appeared that the story might be about Joe Dillon, the tearaway who will become a priest. But, he is soon forgotten. Then, perhaps, it could be the story of the entire Dillon family, since Leo is mentioned as are the Dillon parents and their dedicated 8 o'clock Mass, no truants they. This "ghostly paradigm", this pre-guessing as to where the tale is heading, soon flops to the ground. Leo Dillon does not even turn up to play truant as he was supposed to have done. Perhaps, then, the "encounter" will be about Father Butler and the school. The writer plants all these possible, though false, leads then seems to just let them fade away. A closer inspection, however, reveals that nothing in the story has been lightly or paddingly put in.

For instance, Father Butler is a teacher very fond of punishing little boys. The pervert is obsessed with "whipping little boys". Father Butler is a snob who looks down upon "national school boys". The sexual deviant assumes an accent of similar snobbery whenever he talks about the boy's pal Mahoney. Joe Dillon will become a priest, maybe just like Father Butler, and Father Butler is a man with a disposition not far removed from that of the greasy aging man in the field. A kind of cluster is then set up: Priest-Pedagogue-Pervert, a cluster which may go round and round generation after generation, like the gnomon.

Finally, the encounter of "An Encounter" could be the narrator's encounter with himself. At the opening, he is afraid when playing at Indians, at the end, he runs panicking from the pervert. At the opening, the "I" despises Leo and, at the end, he admits that "he had always despised (Mahoney) a little". This would account for the strange expression, found early in the story, where "the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon (shades of bleaching biscuits here) awakened one of my consciences". Generally, we assume that people have but one conscience; Joyce cleverly shows that we have a great many more. We have a societally induced one, the one drilled in by Father Butler at school; but we have at least one other. Such a one other is that which tells us the Leos and Mahoneys of this world are human too and, perhaps, more worthy than we ourselves are.

In "An Encounter", we find the themes of "The Sisters"—sexual perversion, church control, paralysis, and the rest. The narrating voice, however, is more mature and is beginning to judge itself, to encounter itself as both subject and object, in its encounters with real life. The same values are being endorsed by Joyce here as those we met with before. They are now becoming touched by the "musty biscuits" of experience. The narrative "I" learns something of humility and begins to appreciate the value of those like Mahoney or Leo Dillon who he had started by despising. Dublin itself, however, is still dying under pressures of church and sexual perversion. The green in the eyes of carefree but imaginary Norwegian adventurers, the green of Irish patriots, for Joyce, is only found in the monotonous drone of the bile issuing from a pervert's slabbering lips.

"Araby" is another story of seeking for escape and adventure. The last childhood tale, it is also the one to have suffered most at the hands of American critics with their symbol-hunting and their ahistoricism. A fresh look, an innocent eye, is what the story now needs to release it from the suffocating air of the dank ivory tower. Joyce said, of Dubliners, that it had been written in a style "of scrupulous meanness"; on one plane, that of surface language, "Araby" appears to contradict this. "Araby" is full of "romance" language or rather the language of a certain type of bookish, sickly magazine romance. Possibly the worst example is when the young boy cries out: "O love! O love!" from the dank room where lately an old priest had died. This is paralleled, in the text, by "the cold empty gloomy rooms" liberating the young boy and causing him to sing. The young narrator is very much like the Southern Belle in Huckleberry Finn who is in love with death and romantic novels. We recall that, of the three books left in the priest's room, the boy prefers "the last best" because "its leaves were yellow". Here content is not important; only the romantic look of the thing is, and that romance is equated with death.

There are indeed two very distinct narrative tones. There is the finely crafted opening, obviously Joyce himself. The sentence begins with "North Richmond Street being blind ..." and ends "... Christian Brothers' School set the boys free". The balance and scrupulosity reveals that the tale will deal with blindness and illusory freedom, with dead-ends and church control.

"Araby" is simply about a boy who sees himself in the role of some romantic knight seeking a treasure for the lady he has elected as his Guinevere and who fails. The title suggests the exotic, the word itself reminds the narrator of "an Eastern enchantment". "Araby" is in truth a bazaar in a forbidding building run by the English. The only thing the boy witnesses there are a weary man at the entrance, two men "counting money", and a flighty "bright young English thing" flirting with two "gentlemen". The building, far from enchantment is "like ... a church after a service". There are "great jars" that stand "like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall". What is East of Ireland is not fabulous enchantment, but the iron rule of Britannia. This English presence had been touched on earlier by the street urchins in the market place that same Saturday. This is not stated aloud. Joyce simply notes that market lads sing ballads about "troubles in our native land". "Troubles", in 1904, were, of course, England. The boy sees himself as bearing his "chalice safely through a throng of foes" (in typically overdone romance terms). In fact, his chalice here is like that of Father Flynn's in "The Sisters"—it is empty.

He goes knight-erranting only to find himself in a bizarre situation: a dark building like a church, run by the English and dedicated to making-money. The way he spends his Saturday night is then not so different from the way the hapless Mangan is spending hers. She must pass the time in a "retreat that week in her convent". Either the colonial power has you in its secular power or the Roman Catholic Church entraps you in its. This is hinted at, during the boy's first conversation with Mangan, where he learns of "Araby". She is seen twisting a silver bracelet about her wrist and standing "the hand upon the railing", for all the world as if she were a somewhat pampered but shackled prisoner behind bars. The gestural, again, holds the key to Joyce's own interpretation of the situation. Obviously her idea of the "Araby" bazaar coincides with the boy's; while both are prisoners of different secular powers, they are both prisoners of the romantic fantasies of youth.

Some have seen an "epiphany"—a concentrated moment of self-understanding—in the narrator's final words: "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity ..." The language, however, is still sturm-und-drang overdone. After all, he's only a teenager who has wasted train-fare and an exorbitant shilling entrance fee, he's not the Ancient Mariner. He has broken his promise to Mangan that he would buy her something, but he is not Sir Perceval. The suggestion is that until language is cured of ham posturing, Joyce's own life's ambition, there can be no true redemption for the people of Dublin. Joyce is not so hard on all voices in "Araby". The boy's uncle, though obviously a tippler, is not mocked when he wishes to break out with "The Arab's Farewell to His Steed" nor are the street arabs and their sad ballads. It is only the pretentious and the snobbish who come under his censorious scrutiny. Just as we saw with the pervert, sexual perversion is linked by Joyce to social perversion, so here too, the narrator's ideological perversion is matched by his social snobbery: "We ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages" and "I bore my chalice through a throng of foes". The lad here is another Father Butler protégé.

Symbols, which we have deliberately played down so far, are strewn about "Araby". There are, at least: The harp, the pump, the garden and the three books. The harp, the symbol of Ireland, is alluded to in connection with how the narrator considers his body as one, played upon by Mangan. Probably, this is a dig at the Celtic Twilight writers of the Yeats school, active at this time. The dead priest's "rusty bicycle pump" under the bush in the run-down garden of Eden out the back of the house suggests the "musty air" of his room, of his church and his sermons. Wheels can never revolve if they are deprived of air. The rusty priestly pump is but another symbol of paralysis and the stagnant. The three books all emphasize spurious types of literature that Joyce is fighting against, as he attempts to cleanse the language by following the likes of Flaubert and Ibsen.

So, "Araby" does deserve the high praise it has so often been given. What is great about it is its underplaying of important themes and its economy of expression. It is about a growing lovesick youth whose language represents that state but, more, it is about dead language, clichéd thought, Imperialism, corrupting power, the paralysis of the Edwardian era. There is even a gnomon to be found in the text. The train pulls into the station at ten to ten. The hands of the clock would then form a perfect gnomon. The train's arrival at a would-be Paradise is a frozen point in time where the gnomon's shadow is cast over the disillusionment to come. Simony plays its part when the Araby bazaar is viewed as dedicated to Mammon and not to raising charity for good works. The double-priced entrance fee at almost closing-time is indicative of this.

From the florin the boy was given by his uncle, there is eight pence left. The entrance fee was one shilling—the boy's "mission" leaves him wide-open to financial exploitation—and he has eight pence left from the original two shillings. The third class train fare must then have been six pence. By the time he arrives home, unless he bought a return ticket, he will have but two pennies left. Joyce suggests that the money wasted might better have been spent by the uncle down the local, by the kids and the women in the market. That is, Joyce backgrounds, but constantly has his eye on, the world as a materialistic entity where human culture survives on a daily basis. His values are all the stuff of life against those "big words"—God, State, and so on—"which make us all so unhappy". In Dubliners, there is as yet no human, humane force big enough to offset decay. That force will only be found in the Stephen/Bloom symbiosis of Ulysses written by the mature Joyce after those "big words" had sent millions to the slaughter which was the First World War.

Copyright © Peter A. Muckley 2003