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Roopesh comments on
30.3.1999

Chandra and Ruth, your interpretation is very beautiful and comprehensive. Yes, there is something of a coming-of-age of the boy. This transition is on all planes and connects the other stories.

If you ask the question, "who does the boy represent?", it is clear that it is Joyce himself! It tells us something of what he felt about Irish society and it's rules and hypocrisy, about the church and it's rigidity and of his love for Dublin. It is the story of HIS coming of age. At the same time, it is also a view of freedom as seen from Joyce's perspective.

Here there is an interesting parallel with Salman Rushdie. It seemed to me from reading his novels that the hero of the story is Rushdie himself and the central characters don't change from Midnight's Children to Moors Last Sigh. Now I don't know Rushdie personally of course, but from what I have read of him and his views of life, I feel that his novels are his story against different backgrounds.

Beth adds
30.3.1999

Thanks to all for your insightful comments on Encounter.

As I re-read the story I kept coming back to the split between order and disorder in the world and within the characters themselves. The narrator referred to the Wild West tales as "chronicles of disorder" and the escape they offered him from the ordered life of school, church and home, all of which he mentions during the course of the story. His frustration with this repressive control of his life leads him to cut class, to seek real adventures "abroad" in the world and to notice as he crosses the river how "School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane."

But, as Roopesh pointed out, the narrator couldn't handle the perceived disorder of their encounter with the older man and end up fleeing from it. The man himself was a contradiction of (dis)order--shabbily dressed but his "accent was good," fondly remembering his school days but later speaking harshly, even punatively against schoolboy things like having sweethearts.

He might represent the boy in the future, as Chandra suggested, might foreshadow the hypocracy of the adult world. For he certainly changes his tune and has "forgotten his recent liberalism" when he comes back from whatever it was he was doing that so shocked Mahony. (And yes, I, too, read into the unspoken that he was masturbating.) Perhaps he felt guilty for his lack of self-control and was trying to make up for it with his sudden focus on beating such inclinations out of others. Namely, "rough" boys who demonstrate pre-sexual longings by having sweethearts. But in this, too, he goes overboard, turns the whipping itself into more than an act of social control.

His description of what he would do to such a boy becomes "an elaborate mystery." The man's voice "grew almost affectinate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him." Were I to hear someone tell me that, I would probably flee, too!

In the end we return to our narrator, who was able to turn away from tales of the wild west during the "restraning influence of the school", who had always despised Mahony, perhaps for carrying a catapult, for chasing little kids and cats and using slang. Did he despise Mahony for his immaturity, his sweethearts? In the end, this boy who seemed rougher, less intelligent, ran to him "as if to bring me aid." To return to him some innocence he came very close to losing on this unrestrained encounter with his own awakening? For every bit of wisdom gained, a bit of innocence lost.

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