“… a young lad [should] run about and play with young lads of his own age…” suggests that the narrator has spent a great deal of time with the priest. Even in death, the boy can not free himself from the presence of Father Flynn (Stone 169) as is illustrated in the following passage: “But the grey face still followed me. It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region; and there again I found it waiting for me”. The boy feels the need to get away from the priest, but this proves to be impossible. When he ran away into his “pleasant and vicious region”, the priest was still there—haunting him. In fact, even before the narrator is thoroughly convinced that the priest is dead, he is worried that Father Flynn will haunt him (Stone 169): “In the dark of my room I imagined that I saw again the heavy grey face of the paralytic. I drew the blankets over my head and tried to think of Christmas”. These passages convey the idea that the boy was afraid of the priest and felt somewhat freed by his death. This is further proven when the boy, after having seen the card announcing the death of the priest, thinks it “strange that neither [he] nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and [he] even felt annoyed at discovering in [him]self a sensation of freedom as if [he] had been freed from something by [Father Flynn’s] death”. This feeling of freedom suggests that the boy understood that he was a captive of Father Flynn, and thereby, also a captive of the church. With the Father’s death, perhaps the death of his captivity came as well. The idea of religious bondage can be seen in An Encounter by examining the relationship between the boys and Father Butler. When Leo Dillion is caught reading The Apache Chief in class, “everyone’s heart palpitated” as Father Butler frow...
