“An Encounter” is a short story in Joyce’s story collection Dubliners that belongs to the modernist genre. Modernism was defined by writers experimenting with common literary tropes and conventions as a way to capture the alienation experienced by people living in the industrialized, war-torn 20th century. The modernist elements in “An Encounter” include the young narrator’s disaffected tone, the uncomfortable pedophilic content, and the unresolved ending.
While the ending may seem to be “resolved” in the sense that the narrator escapes from the strange old man, he does not mature into the type of heroic character that would appear in pre-modernist stories. In other words, he does not defend himself, but runs away, full of fear and shame. In this way, the story can be considered a Modernist coming-of-age story. The narrator does not come of age in an empowered way, but in a disempowered one, experiencing a classic Joycean “epiphany” that he will never have the types of romantic adventures he craves and is trapped in his mundane, repetitive life in Dublin.
In this way, the story also belongs to the genre of naturalism. Naturalist literature sought to communicate to readers the pessimistic notion that oppressed people will never be able to escape their circumstances. In “An Encounter,” the narrator craves romantic adventures, yet the only “adventure” he finds himself in is having a frightening interaction with a pedophilic old man. With this story, Joyce suggests that, for middle- and lower-class people in Dublin in the early 20th century, disappointment was all they could expect.
