Reading and misreading are central and ubiquitous in Joyce’s narratives; often, they are connected to some form of sexual desire. This dialectic begins with the stories in Dubliners and extends throughout Joyce’s career. R. B. Kershner has drawn attention to the great surge of popular literature in Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth century that included numerous Wild West tales, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, The Count of Monte Cristo, and other such works. He goes on to observe that “as a result the characters of Joyce’s fiction are all bovaristes, and Joyce provides the textual evidence of their possession by their reading” (Bakhtin 301). This is certainly the case for a large number of the uncritical readers portrayed within Dubliners. A somewhat expanded Bovary-type model often prevails, as characters regularly misapply the conclusions of nonrealist fiction to situations in the actual world.

A paradigmatic example is found in “An Encounter,” where some boys’ passionate reading of Westerns engenders thoughts of freedom: the narrator, like the other boys, hungers “for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer” (21).