When the narrator is talking to the strange old man—before he realizes that the man is a pedophile—he notices that the man is speaking in a circular way and describes this metaphorically, as seen in the following passage:
He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her beautiful soft hair. He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.
The metaphor here—in which the narrator says that the old man’s “mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit”—equates the man’s mind with an orbiting planet or moon. This orbiting is evident in the way the man speaks, with the words “nice” and “soft” coming up several times in phrases like, “nice soft hair, “how soft their hands were,” “beautiful soft hair,” “nice young girl,” and “nice white hands.”
This metaphor helps readers to understand how often the man is repeating himself in this scene and also connects this man’s repetitions with the repetitive quality of the narrator’s life. One of Joyce’s intentions with “An Encounter” is to demonstrate how young people in Ireland in the early 20th century were trapped in their dull and routine lives. The narrator strays from his normal routine for one day and yet finds himself stuck in a repetitive conversation, signaling that he may never escape the frustrating and repetitive quality of life in Dublin in the early 20th century.
