27 pages • 54 minutes read
James JoyceA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Joyce’s writings include a wide range of modernist approaches. With “An Encounter,” he uses the narrator as a kind of lens through which the reader is able to view a Dublin schoolboy in his natural habitat. We’re privy to all the narrator’s thoughts and schemes as he sets off on his small adventure along Dublin’s waterways.
This natural approach is typical of the stories in Dubliners. In his introduction to the Penguin Classics Centennial Edition of the collection, Terence Brown cites a letter that Joyce wrote to his publisher Grant Richards:
It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass (xxiv).
Joyce clearly felt that he was doing his homeland a great service by adhering strictly to his Naturalist tendencies.
Dublin itself could be considered a character in most Joyce works, and “An Encounter” is a perfect example. It is possible that the story could work in a different setting, but it would likely end up as a completely different story.
By James Joyce
A Painful Case
A Painful Case
James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Araby
Araby
James Joyce
Clay
Clay
James Joyce
Counterparts
Counterparts
James Joyce
Dubliners
Dubliners
James Joyce
Eveline
Eveline
James Joyce
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
James Joyce
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
Ivy Day in the Committee Room
James Joyce
The Boarding House
The Boarding House
James Joyce
The Dead
The Dead
James Joyce
The Sisters
The Sisters
James Joyce
Two Gallants
Two Gallants
James Joyce
Ulysses
Ulysses
James Joyce