When the narrator decides to skip school, he plans to go see the Pigeon House. The Pigeon house was a building whose history encompasses many different uses. That fact, along with the detail that he and Mahony don’t actually make it to the Pigeon House, ties into Joyce’s ideas about Irish cultural decay and paralysis. The Pigeon House started out as a lodging house for workers building Dublin’s Great South Wall, then became a restaurant and hotel for travelers arriving in Dublin Bay. After the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Pigeon House became a military fort for Anglo-Irish forces, before finally undergoing its final transformation into a sewage processing facility and power generating station. The Pigeon House’s transformation from a port for foreign sailors—adventurers—to a sewage processing and power plant after a period of military takeover echoes Joyce’s ideas about English colonization’s impact on Ireland. If the narrator considered the Pigeon House a symbol for adventure, like the green eyes he hoped to find in the foreign sailors around him, and if he had actually completed his journey, he would have been greeted with a symbol of Irish decay: literal sewage.
However, the Pigeon House was also an electrical power plant. Considered in a positive light, the Pigeon House is also associated with light, and its name is associated with the Holy Spirit, which often appears as a dove in its physical form. These aspects of the Pigeon House invite the reader to wonder whether there might be hope for greater Irish renewal despite the narrator’s personal failure and disappointment in his adventure.
The Pigeon House Quotes in An Encounter
With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge…We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House.
We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster’s shop and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide field. We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could see the Dodder.
It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House. We had to be home before four o’clock lest our adventure should be discovered.
The Pigeon House Symbol Timeline in An Encounter
