Jaun’s farewell and departure is a comic, ceremonial leave-taking in which a young traveler addresses his sister and a schoolroom of girls, hesitates over the road ahead, and finally runs off amid their tears and applause. He calls his journey a mission to meet the king of Ireland, but his speeches also reveal how reluctant he is to leave familiar company; the scene makes departure feel at once like heroic duty, affectionate performance, and a movement inside the book’s recurring cycle of separation and return.

The traveler at the night school

Jaun pauses at the weir by Lazar’s Walk to catch his breath and loosen his bruised shoes. His feet are still numb, and he leans against a peace officer who has fallen asleep on night duty. The scene gives the traveler’s grand departure a deliberately ordinary underside: before he can become a figure in a farewell pageant, he must stop, recover, and tend to his footwear.

Nearby, twenty-nine girls from a national night school gather around Jaun, whose appearance makes him a conspicuous spectacle. They surround him with attention, fuss over his hair, and listen as he asks after them and comments on their clothes. His manner is affectionate and playful, but also theatrically courtly: the leave-taking begins not as a solitary hero’s march but as a public exchange with an audience eager to admire him.

The narrator then brings Jaun’s sister Izzy into focus. Jaun recognizes her through the characteristic movement of her voice and appearance, and the narration stresses their closeness: he is both her brother and her godfather, and regards her with deep affection. That bond changes the meaning of the departure. The schoolgirls provide a crowd, but Izzy is the person whose presence makes the leave-taking intimate and consequential.

Farewell as performance

Jaun formally addresses his sister and says that he must leave rather than remain a burden. He recalls the education and affection she gave him, especially her letters and the old tales she told when they were children. His farewell turns shared childhood into a reason to part: the journey is presented as a consequence of what he has learned from her, even as the memory of their closeness makes leaving harder.

His speech soon shifts register. In a mock-sermon, Jaun recounts a priest’s advice to the girls, including instructions to follow the commandments during his absence. The passage mixes religious authority, comic confusion, and public address, making the farewell less a simple declaration than a performance stitched together from lessons, ritual language, and jokes. Jaun’s leave-taking repeatedly borrows the forms of ceremony without settling into solemnity.

When he speaks again to Izzy, the confident traveler falters. Looking upward, he says that he is in no violent hurry and imagines remaining among familiar comforts instead of going on. He longs for the woman appointed to his heart and describes a life of ease, companionship, and even considerable wealth. The imagined alternative gives his departure a clear emotional counterweight: he is not simply eager to escape but can picture reasons to stay.

Mission, hesitation, and parting

Jaun nevertheless recasts the journey as a glorious and historically important mission. He declares that he is going to meet not an ordinary ruler but Ireland’s overking, and invokes the Vico road’s circling course as he reassures his sister. The confidence sits beside uncertainty: he presents the future as something he is sure of while acknowledging the cycles that draw him onward. The road therefore signifies more than distance; it joins the immediate leave-taking to a pattern of recurrence.

Before he goes, Jaun warns the women against turning his absence into a scene of grief and quarrels. He imagines their mourning in deliberately extravagant terms, then answers it with promises of a future reunion in a blessed, timeless community. His farewell moves between loss and consolation: the separation is real, but the language keeps projecting a time when the dispersed company will be together again.

The final address grows more openly reluctant. Jaun says that it is time to get up and move, complains that the place is too small for him, and imagines traveling far away. His departure is propelled by a mixture of claimed duty and restless self-invention rather than by an uncomplicated resolve. Even as he announces that he is going, he continues to speak as if the act of leaving must be talked into being.

The leave-taking becomes an event

After Jaun’s last speech, the girls gather to cheer him if he leaps and curse him if he falls. The crowd’s response makes his exit a public test, half send-off and half spectacle. Jaun gives himself a sudden prod and sits upright; the girls answer with tears and clapping as he moves away. The scene makes the crowd’s grief inseparable from its performance of approval.

At the brink of departure, Jaun collects a familiar yellow label, drops something onto it, and carries out a series of small gestures: he curses, chokes back laughter, spits, blows his own trumpet, and sticks the label to his brow as a badge of belief. The gesture briefly recasts the comic traveler as a pious emblem, though the narrator’s emphasis on its irrepressibility keeps the moment from becoming straightforwardly solemn. Jaun then waves across the sea as if signaling that he is leaving.

He loses his balance, topples, and makes a new start down the road. Moving quickly on foot, he passes by the bridge beyond Ladycastle and disappears from sight among the statues. The girls’ messages and good wishes follow him in the form of a swelling send-off, while their mourning registers the cost of his departure. The ending is therefore both an escape into motion and a disappearance from the company that has gathered to watch.

Departure and recurrence

The farewell does not close with a settled account of where Jaun will arrive. Instead, its language treats his passage as both an immediate exit and a future return: the narrator imagines him traveling for decades before coming home to an Ireland that belongs to all time. Jaun’s departure thus becomes a story the people left behind can keep telling, not simply a completed journey.

The scene’s changing voices and unstable scale support that open ending. A tired traveler at a weir becomes a schoolroom celebrity, a dutiful brother, a mock preacher, a prospective hero, and finally a runner swallowed by the road. His words repeatedly counter his actions—he imagines staying while announcing that he must go—and the crowd converts a private separation into a shared rite. In this way, the episode gives the cycle of departure and return a local human shape: affection makes leaving painful, ceremony makes it visible, and the promise of recurrence keeps it from being final.