What happens in Chapter 2 of Dubliners?
Two schoolboys in Dublin—our unnamed narrator and his friend Mahony—decide to skip school for a day, lost in dreams of Wild West adventures inspired by the penny dreadfuls they've read. They take a ferry across the Liffey to the Pigeon House, but they never quite get there. Along the way, they meet a ragged group of kids and later spot a stray cat. Their aimless wandering leads to a disturbing encounter with an old man sitting next to them in a field. At first, he talks benignly about books and girls, but then he wanders off. When he comes back, his demeanor has changed to something more secretive and unsettling: he delivers a slow, repetitive speech about the need for whipping boys who have sweethearts. The narrator feels paralyzed with fear—he wants to run but can't. He finally calls out to Mahony using the false name "Murphy," and Mahony's arrival snaps him out of it. The adventure that seemed to promise freedom ends up delivering a queasy, half-understood sense of danger.
Analysis
Joyce structures "An Encounter" like a deflation machine. The chapter starts with the grammar of boyhood fantasy—cowboys, Indians, and the liberating syntax of American pulp fiction—and methodically strips away each promise of escape. The journey to the Pigeon House represents the story's first irony: the boys never make it there. Joyce uses this failed destination to highlight that the real subject is not adventure but the impossibility of it within the paralyzed city.
The old man serves as Joyce's most carefully crafted source of menace. His first appearance feels almost pastoral; the second, after his unexplained absence, feels tonally inverted. This shift isn't conveyed through explicit statements but through the narrator's physical sensations—“my heart was beating quickly with fear”—and through the man’s language, which becomes circular, incantatory, and obsessive. Joyce expects readers to feel what the boy cannot yet articulate.
The false name "Murphy" is a subtle masterstroke. It represents the narrator’s only act of self-protection, and it’s a lie—a small, necessary fiction. This sets the stage for a broader Joycean theme that identity in Dublin is always performed under pressure.
The Wild West motif runs through the story as an ironic counterpoint: the freedom those tales promised is exactly what Dublin—and its predatory strangers—denies. The chapter's flat, declarative prose style reflects the boys' emotional numbness, allowing the horror to creep in sideways, much like it does in real life.
Key quotes from Chapter 2
“He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit.”
The narrator describes the old man's second monologue, registering its hypnotic, predatory repetition before he fully understands its nature.
“I was too confused to do anything but keep on looking at him over my shoulder as I went.”
As the narrator finally moves away, Joyce renders his paralysis in purely physical terms — the body's inability to translate fear into clean flight.
“And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.”
The story's closing sentence, in which the narrator's relief at Mahony's rescue is complicated by a sudden, discomfiting self-knowledge.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 2
- penitent
- Feeling genuine sorrow or guilt for something wrong one has done or thought; sincerely sorry.
- magnetised
- Held in a fixed, trance-like state of fascination, as if drawn by an invisible force and unable to break free.