Explore Joyce’s treatment of Epiphanies in some of the stories you have studied.

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English - James Joyce

Explore Joyce's treatment of Epiphanies in some of the stories you have studied.

In literally every of story of Joyce studied so far we could discover one or more epiphanies. This term is generally used as a description of any sudden moments of understanding or sense of revelation. Joyce himself once described them as "sudden spiritual manifestations", whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. I will try to fathom these epiphanies and Joyce's use of them in the following.

The story I am going to start with is "An Encounter", which happens to be at an early stage of Joyce's chronological order in Dubliners - childhood.

It mainly deals with a bunch of younger school boys, who live a rather sheltered childhood in catholic Dublin, reading stories about the Wild West, playing Indian fights, and having parents who go to "eight-o'clock mass every morning". Inspired by the stories read in their Wild West booklets, Leo Dillon, Mahony and the narrator decide to have their own little adventure and plan a day out of school, playing truant and going to see the so called Pigeon House at the other end of Dublin. However, in the next morning they are starting their journey without Leo Dillon. Mahony freely comments: "Come along. I knew Fatty'd funk it".

When the two boys, after a long voyage, still haven't arrived at their destination, they agree to give up their initial plan and just to rest some time on a bench in a field. After a few calm minutes Mahony and the Narrator discover an older man approaching at the far end of the field, "shabbily dressed" and walking "with one hand upon his hip" and a stick in the other hand. Having arrived at the bench with the two young boys on it, he wishes a good-day and starts to talk about the weather. Suggesting the boys that "the happiest time of one's life was undoubtedly one's schoolboy days", the bores Mahony and the narrator, who nevertheless keep silent. In the following, the old man talks, mainly to the narrator, about literature and, from there, changes the subject to "totties". He expresses a very liberal point of view about young people's lives - "Every boy, he said, has a little sweetheart". Silence follows a long monologue of the old man about young girls and other things the speaker admits not actually to understands, which implies us that it could be about sexual allusions as the two boys are still quite young. The man stands up and walks to the near end of the field. Arrived there, he does something that wakes Mahony's interest: "I say! Look what he is doing" and a bit later "I say... He's a queer old josser" which suggests us that the man might be, excited by two little boys, masturbating just a few meters away from them. Some minutes later, he comes back and again starts a monologue, but it seems he has "forgotten his recent liberalism": In language influenced by sadism he states that school boys should be whipped and whipped again, especially if they told lies about their "sweethearts", he would give them "such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world". Calmly, the narrator departs, obviously worried by behaviour and stories of the old man, and joins Mahony who has gone away, into the field, earlier. Together they leave the place.
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Back to the epiphanies: the first one we can find is apparently the moment when Mahony finds the old man masturbating only a few meters off. No matter if the boys actually know what he is doing, it is definitely a so called "sudden spiritual manifestation": they know that what the man is doing there is strange for them, and it abruptly changes the way they look at him. Although there is no physical threat for them at that moment, Mahony and the speaker feel worried and confused, and one of them even runs away after having seen ...

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