Structured Encounters With the Discursive Term Paper

After the horseplay, he and his companion Mooney are left bereft of joy and "the sun went in behind some clouds and left us to our jaded thoughts and the crumbs of our provisions." (4) The boys soon encounter another man, who, like Father Butler, is learned, but whom takes a liberal view of sexuality and promotes the value of a diverse array of reading materials. The protagonist feels dimly awakened by this encounter with an individual, and more importantly experiences a refreshing attitude he has never encountered before, and is not likely to encounter again in his daily, routine existence. He is offered another path between that of Catholicism and the wild boisterous and occasionally cruel play of Mooney, and the order that he returns to is infused with a new, more positive consciousness and sense of his place in the world.

"Araby," likewise takes an orderly protagonist into a wild world, in this case of an Irish county fair. It begins with order, and faith, a place where a priest has just died. "The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room ... He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister." (1) The protagonist idolizes the woman, "morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood." The orderly, chaste priest is contrasted with the sensual, wild impulses the woman brings up in the protagonist. He describes how her "image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop- boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks ... " (1)

This early street scene of boy's cries and pig cheeks will become a precursor to the fair where the image of this pure woman, in an even more chaotic environment is deflated in a piggish fashion. Thus, in "An Encounter" the wild boys, living in a calm environment, encounter a priest, who enforces the dominant societal values, go even more wild, and have a more meaningful encounter (for the protagonist and narrator) with a scholarly man who offers them another path, changing the protagonist's life forever, even after he enters back into the order of his daily life, and the disorder of the 'Wild, Wild West' play of boys. "Araby" begins with a stark contrast between chastity and desire too, and the order of mundane life, proceeds into a fair, wherefrom the protagonist emerges sadder and wiser about life and the nature of women.

Works Cited

Joyce, James. "An Encounter." Dubliners. http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/63/frameset.html

Joyce, James. "Araby." Dubliners. Bibliomania. http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/63/frameset.html.....