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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in An Encounter, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Hero’s Journey and Disappointment
Masculinity, Sexuality, and Coming of Age
Routine and Repetition
Religion, Colonization, and Power
Paralysis and Decay
Summary
Analysis
Joe Dillon introduces the narrator and his friends to the Wild West by lending them his adventure magazines. After school, the narrator and his friends meet Joe and his younger brother Leo in their backyard to stage “Indian battles.” But no matter how hard they fight against him, Joe always wins and celebrates with a victory dance.
Joe Dillon’s interest in the Wild West connects the Irish, who were under English colonial control at the turn of the 20th century, to indigenous people in the United States. Both groups had been fighting losing battles against colonial powers for centuries; and after so many defeats, the losing battles become almost routine. But Joe’s history-flipping victories over the cowboys suggest that young Irish people might yet have a new fighting spirit and an ability to carve a new path, like the adventuresome Wild West. As a role model for the younger narrator, Joe sets an example of aggressive, heroic masculinity, and stokes the narrator’s desire for adventure. But because he is always on the losing side, the narrator hints that he does not necessarily see Joe’s victories as hope for the Irish—instead, they are just another routine. Further, the fact that Joe’s victories occur in a fantasy game suggests that the hope of this sort of aggression leading to liberation might itself also be a fantasy.
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Every morning, Joe’s parents go to mass on Gardiner Street, and when the narrator goes to the Dillons’ house, Mrs Dillon’s “peaceful odour” lingers. But even so, Joe always played too roughly with the kids who were younger and less adventurous such as the narrator. The narrator thinks that Joe looks like “some kind of an Indian” when he plays wearing a tea-cozy on his head, beating a fake drum, and shouting. When the narrator later learns that Joe has decided to go into the priesthood, he and his friends can hardly believe it.
The Dillons’ religious devotion is extreme for the time, and the church on Gardiner Street was a Jesuit church. These details signal that the Dillons’ piety is likely also tied up in social ambitions, since the Jesuits were at the top of the Catholic socioeconomic ladder. In this way the story makes clear that Catholic religion is connected to social power in Ireland. When the narrator describes Joe’s aggression, he signals to the reader that he does not experience his routine defeat in their games as a colonized people’s victory over their colonizers, but as an aggressive masculine force’s victory over his more vulnerable opponents—aggression can be used as easily to harm the weak as fight off the strong. Joe’s decision to go into the priesthood somewhat undercuts the picture that the narrator painted of him as a violent and wild boy: the Catholic Church’s strict order and discipline seems the exact opposite of Joe’s habits. While the narrator is left mystified and somewhat disappointed by the “taming” of the wild hero, the reader can see how a powerful institution like the Church might appeal to a power-seeking boy like Joe, and how the Church co-opts such power-seeking in order to maintain its own power. Meanwhile, Joe’s move into the priesthood might also cement his own family’s social rise. In all, the story depicts a Catholic Church that is cynical and worldly, as opposed to a bulwark to protect the weak.
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Themes
With Joe gone, the narrator and his friends carry on the Wild West games. While some of them play because they enjoy it, others play because they don’t want to seem “studious” or cowardly. The narrator belongs to the latter group. Although the Wild West stories give him the escape he wants, he really prefers detective stories that have wild and beautiful women in them.
Even though there is nothing bad about the Wild West stories, the narrator and his friends made sure to read them in secret when at school. One day, Leo Dillon flubs his Latin translation in class, at which point their teacher, Father Butler, notices and confiscates an adventure magazine from him. In front of the entire class, Father Butler chastises Leo for reading such “rubbish” instead of Roman History and adds that the author likely writes “for a drink.” He shames his class of “educated” boys for reading adventure stories, saying he might understand such behavior if they attended National School (as opposed to the Jesuit-run day school that they do attend). He finishes up his speech by telling Leo to work harder, and when the narrator looks into Leo’s face, the Wild West loses some of its “glory” in his eyes.
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With summer approaching, though, the narrator’s taste for “wild sensations” returns. He is tired of just playing games of war, and longs to experience a real adventure. To make an adventure for himself, he plots to skip school with Leo and another boy named Mahony. They plan their cover stories for their school absences and pool their money so they can afford to take the ferry out to a former military dock called the Pigeon House. Leo fears being seen by one of their teachers during their adventure, but Mahony reminds him that their teachers will be in school. They all shake hands and plan to meet the next morning.
After a bad night’s sleep, the narrator is the first to arrive at their meeting-place in the morning. He takes a moment to admire his shoes, which he had cleaned the night before, and contentedly watches businesspeople pass by. Mahony soon arrives and pulls out a slingshot, explaining that he brought it to “have some gas” with birds along the way. The narrator notices how often Mahony uses slang. After waiting for Leo for another half hour, Mahony declares that he knew that Leo would chicken out and that they should take Leo’s money and venture on without him.
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As the narrator and Mahony walk, Mahony chases some “ragged girls” and threatens them with his unloaded slingshot. When two “ragged boys” defend the girls by throwing stones at Mahony and the narrator, Mahony wants to fight back. The narrator points out that the orphan boys are too small to fight and convinces Mahony to leave them alone. As the narrator and Mahony pass by, the orphans all call them “Swaddlers,” mistaking the two boys for Protestants because Mahony was wearing a hat with the badge of cricket team on it.
When the narrator and Mahony reach a popular swimming spot in Dublin Bay called the Smoothing Iron, they try to get the spot all to themselves but fail because they need a third person to pull it off. Frustrated, they call Leo a “funk” and imagine how many strokes of the pandybat, a reinforced leather strap, he will get “at three o’clock” from a teacher back at school. By the river, they watch construction crews work until cart-drivers yell at them for being in the way. Once all the workers break for lunch, the boys buy snacks and eat while they watch the ships pass by. Mahony says it would be “right skit” to go to sea, which makes the narrator imagine really seeing all the places he learned about in school and feel far away from school and from home.
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After they eat, the narrator and Mahony cross the river on a ferry. They try to act seriously but laugh the moment their eyes meet. When they land on the other side of the river, the narrator tries, and fails, to read the writing on a Norwegian ship. As the foreign sailors mill around, he looks at them to see if any of them have green eyes but finds that none of them do. He watches one sailor with green-ish eyes entertain the crowd on the quay for a while but realizes the performance repeats and he and Mahony move on.
As the day gets hotter, the narrator and Mahony wander into Ringsend, a Dublin neighborhood. When they buy sweets and raspberry lemonade, Mahony regains some of his energy and chases a cat into a field by the Dodder River. Exhausted, the boys sit down by the riverbank and decide that they are too tired to go all the way to the Pigeon House and still make it home on time to avoid being caught. Mahony is disappointed until the narrator suggests they take the train home. When the sun goes behind a cloud, the boys sit quietly thinking.
Sometime later, a man wearing a cheap suit and using a walking stick walks into the field. He passes the narrator and Mahony in the field, glancing at them as he walks by, then turns around and walks back and says hello. The man sits beside them and talks about the weather and the authors he read when he was in school: Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Lytton. Although the conversation bores the narrator, he pretends to have read each of the books the man mentioned.
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Once the narrator pretends to recognize the books, the man says that the narrator must be a fellow “bookworm” and points at Mahony, saying he is different: he prefers games. The man tells the boys that he has all of Scott’s and Lytton’s books and re-reads them often—but then adds that some of Lord Lytton’s books are not for boys to read. When Mahony asks him why, the narrator is embarrassed because he does not want the man to think he is “as stupid as Mahony.” But the man does not answer Mahony’s question. Instead, he just smiles, and the narrator notices that most of his teeth are missing and that all the teeth he has are yellow.
The man asks the boys which of them has “the most sweethearts.” Mahony answers that he has “three totties,” while the narrator says he has none. In disbelief, the man says that the narrator must have a sweetheart. The narrator says nothing. When Mahony asks the man how many sweethearts he has, the man smiles again and says that when he was a boy he had many sweethearts: “Every boy,” he says, “has a little sweetheart.” The narrator finds the man’s attitude on the subject oddly casual given his age.
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As the narrator reflects on what the man is saying, he thinks that the man’s words themselves are “reasonable.” But the narrator grows increasingly uneasy as he finds that he disliked how the “reasonable” words sounded in the man’s mouth, and he wonders why the man sometimes shivers while he’s speaking, as if he is cold or afraid.
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From his talk about sweethearts, the man transitions to talking about girls. As he talks about their “nice soft hair” and “soft hands,” the narrator notices that the man has an upper-class accent. The man tells the narrator and Mahony that “all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew” and that he likes nothing more than looking at nice young girls.
Listening closely, the narrator notices the man circling back to similar phrases and gets the sense that the man might be “repeating something which he had learned by heart,” or that the words have somehow “magnetised” the man’s mind so that he always returns to them. As the man keeps talking, the narrator notices more variations in the man’s voice: sometimes it seems like he is “simply alluding” to something obvious and sometimes he talks like he is telling the boys a secret that he doesn’t want anyone else to hear. All the while, the narrator keeps his eyes on the ground in front of him and not on the man.
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After a long time talking, the man suddenly falls silent and slowly stands. He tells the boys that he has to leave for a few minutes and the narrator watches him walk away out of the corner of his eye. He and Mahony don’t speak to each other until Mahony says, “I say! Look what he’s doing!” When the narrator doesn’t look up or respond, Mahony says, “I say… He’s a queer old josser!” The narrator breaks his silence to suggest to Mahony that if the man asks for their names, they should give him fake names: Murphy and Smith. But the two boys don’t speak any further.
In the silence, the narrator wonders whether he should avoid the man if he comes back. When the man does come back and sit down again, the narrator stays put. But Mahony sees the same cat he chased earlier and jumps up to chase it again. The narrator and the man silently watch as Mahony fails to catch the cat, throws stones at the wall the cat climbed to escape, then starts to wander around the other end of the field.
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After watching Mahony for a while, the man observes that Mahony is “a very rough boy” and asks the narrator if he gets “whipped” often at school. Offended by the man’s language, the narrator wants to make clear that he and Mahony don’t get “whipped” like boys at the National School do, but instead he doesn’t say anything. When the narrator doesn’t respond, the man starts talking about whipping boys, his voice falling into the same “magnetised” rhythm from earlier.
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As the man talks around his new subject, saying that the only good thing to do with a rough boy is to whip him because “what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping,” the narrator listens, shocked. In his surprise, the narrator glances up at the man and finds himself looking directly into the man’s “bottle-green eyes.” The man’s forehead twitches in response and the narrator quickly looks away again.
Seeming to have forgotten his earlier opinions about boys and sweethearts, the man tells the narrator that if he ever saw a boy “talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart” then he would “whip him and whip him” to teach him not to talk to girls. Confused, the narrator stays silent and listens as the man tells him that he wants nothing more than to give a boy who has a sweetheart but lies and says he doesn’t “such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world.”
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While the man describes the kind of whipping he would like to give to such a boy, the narrator takes note of the man’s tone: his usual monotone gives way to something that the narrator thinks is “almost affectionate.” This tone, the narrator thinks, seems to “plead” with him to “understand” the man. The narrator keeps silent and waits for the man to stop talking again.
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When the man finally pauses, the narrator quickly stands up. Not wanting to reveal his discomfort or appear too eager to leave, he spends a moment pretending to adjust his shoe, then says that he has to leave. He tells the man goodbye and walks “calmly” back towards the road, as his heart races with the fear that the man would “seize” him “by the ankles.”
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At the top of the hill, the narrator avoids looking at the man and tries to get Mahony’s attention, calling, “Murphy!” The narrator notices that his voice sounds like he is trying to sound brave and feels a bit ashamed of his plan when Mahony doesn’t answer, and he has to call again. But when Mahony hears him, he runs across the field as if the narrator needed help. As the narrator’s heart races watching Mahony run, he feels a stab of guilt, regretting all the time he had spent secretly disliking him.
