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 …showed first 75 words of 888 total…

…showed last 75 words of 888 total…lay there in his coffin (p.6)." In "An Encounter", his imagination is what starts the whole story. His curiosity about the outside world and how it would be like be sneak out of school leads him to decide to have this adventure. The discussions above show that there are a lot of similarities in the narrator of "The Sisters" and "An Encounter", enough to lead us to believe that the two is the same character.