comparing the first 2 chapters of jame joyce's dubliners

A detailed Summary of comparing the first 2 chapters of jame joyce's dubliners

"The Sisters" and "An Encounter" are stories written by James Joyce in a book called Dubliners. "The Sisters" is the first chapter of the book, follows by the second chapter, "An Encounter." In both chapters, the first person narrator is a boy. No where in this two chapters indicates directly that the boy narrating chapter one and two is the same boy, but there are enough evidences to convince us to believe so. These evidences are the similarities in the boy's character. This paper will discuss the comparison of the narrator's age, his smartness, his observant behavior, and his imagination in "The Sisters" and "An Encounter."

In "The Sisters", we receive the hint about the age of the narrator when old Cotter talks about how he would not want his child to have to have too much to say to the priest. He said his idea is to "let a 'young lad' run about and play with young lads... (P.2)" The word 'young lad' here refers to the narrator. From this we know that the narrator must me a young boy, but still we don't know a specific age. In "An Encounter", we found that the narrator is attending a school. When the teacher was yelling at the narrator and his friends after finding that they have been reading something inappropriate,

The boy in both chapters has a very observant characteristic. He always notices and remembers things in small detail which young kids his age might not do so. In the beginning of "The Sisters", he says "Night after night I had passed the house and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way (p.1)." He does not let things around himself just pass by, he studies them. After the boy believe that the priest is dead, he imagines that if the priest is still alive he would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find the priest sitting there. At this point he describe the way the priest would look like in every little details, such as how the priest hands always tremble, how the clothes would look like, what activity would they be doing, and etc. He remembers when the priest smiles, he "used to uncover his big discolored teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip (p.5)." Also at the house of mourning when he was praying, the boy notices about the old woman "how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side (p.6)." In "An Encounter", the boy spends time examining the foreign sailors eye colors. He picks up that the sailor's eyes were blue and gray and even black. He picks up that "The only sailors whose eyes could have been c

Some common words found in the essay are:
Encounter Sisters, Sisters Night, P15 Eye, Dubliners Sisters, Leo Dillon, Sisters Encounter, James Joyce, sisters encounter, boy chapters, narrator boy, p6 encounter, hooked heels, boots trodden, night night, 'young lad', skirt hooked, skirt hooked heels,

Approximate Word count = 928
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English