In An Encounter, the narrator longs for adventure. He said he enjoyed reading “detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls.” The statement highlights his innocence and his idealized vision of adventure. The narrator then planned to skip school with some of his friends. Skipping school and breaking the rules is just one way of asserting autonomy. The narrator is at a place where he believes he is ready to make some decisions for himself and prove that he is capable of taking care of himself. However, while on his “adventure,” he meets a strange man. The man scares him with strange stories (of unkempt fierce and beautiful girls) but he is compelled to listen, as if hypnotized by the words. The narrator was not able to say why he was scared. This highlights a rejection of ideas which should be known only to adults, like Lord Lytton’s books, “which boys couldn’t read.” In the end, the narrator runs away from the strange man, and returns to the safety of home. He realized that he wasn’t quite ready for adulthood.
In Araby, the narrator goes through another growth experience. This time he dips his toes into the love waters. He becomes enamored with Mangan’s sister and does not know how to deal with the new emotions. He couldn’t even speak to her. His feelings deepened to the point of obsession, “… her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.” And he kept her always in his mind. He finally spoke to her one day and told her that he would buy her something from the bazaar. The narrator’s idea of bazaar was also idealized. Upon arriving at the bazaar he came to the realization that it wasn’t what he thought it would be. He also witnessed an exchange between a woman at a shop and two men. He saw how the woman ignored him and went on and on about insignificant things in her conversation with the men. He was disillusioned, and he realized he had made a terrible mistake, “my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” He felt foolish and realized he was not ready for the adult world of love. The realization returned him to a place of innocence in the sense that he was not ready for adulthood. At the same time, it moved him towards maturity because he became aware of his place in the transition.
In both pieces I felt that Joyce’s tone was calm and peaceful which struck me as ironic given the tumult most people experience during adolescence.
Both stories highlighted the way adolescents test the waters before becoming completely autonomous; the back and forth between childhood and adulthood takes place in slow migrations over the course of many years until complete autonomy is achieved. And even then, most of us continue to wish for those easy days of innocence.
Response to An Encounter, Araby from Dubliners by James Joyce