Dubliners · Chapter
An Encounter explained
A young boy, disillusioned with school and seeking real adventure, plans a day of truancy with his friends Leo Dillon and Mahony.
What happens
A young boy, disillusioned with school and seeking real adventure, plans a day of truancy with his friends Leo Dillon and Mahony. After Leo fails to show up, the narrator and Mahony explore Dublin's docks and fields, encountering a strange, shabbily dressed old man who engages them in unsettling conversation about books, boys, and his own past.
Themes in this chapter
Escape and Frustrated Desire
The narrator seeks real adventure beyond school and home, but the day ends in anticlimax and an unsettling encounter.
Alienation and Loneliness
The boys' isolation in the field and the strange man's lonely, predatory conversation highlight a sense of disconnection.
Disillusionment and Lost Innocence
The narrator's romantic notions of adventure are undercut by the mundane reality and the disturbing interaction with the old man.
Characters to notice
- Joe Dillon
Introduced the Wild West games; later revealed to have a vocation for the priesthood.
- Leo Dillon
Fat younger brother of Joe; caught with a Wild West paper by Father Butler; fails to show up for the truant adventure.
- Mahony
The narrator's companion on the day out; uses slang, carries a catapult, and is more daring and streetwise.
- Father Butler
School authority who rebukes Leo Dillon for reading The Apache Chief instead of studying Roman History.
Key passages
“A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived.”
A rebellious mood spread through the group, making us ignore our usual social and personal differences.
Describes the unifying effect of the desire for adventure.
“But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.”
Away from school, I once again craved the excitement and escape that only those adventure stories seemed to provide.
Highlights the narrator's internal conflict between discipline and desire for freedom.
“He began to talk of the weather, saying that it would be a very hot summer and adding that the seasons had changed greatly since he was a boy—a long time ago.”
He started discussing the weather, predicting a hot summer and remarking how different the seasons were when he was young.
The old man's opening conversational gambit, which soon takes a darker turn.