A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Today, Joyce is celebrated as one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century. He
was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of stream of consciousness,
a stylistic form in which written prose seeks to represent the characters' stream of inner
thoughts and perceptions rather than render these characters from an objective, external
perspective.
Another stylistic technique for which Joyce is noted is the epiphany, a moment in which a
character makes a sudden, profound realizationwhether prompted by an external object or a
voice from withinthat creates a change in his or her perception of the world.Most notable is
a scene in which Stephen sees a young girl wading at the beach, which strikes him with the
sudden realization that an appreciation for beauty can be truly good.
Themes

The Development of Individual Consciousness

Perhaps the most famous aspect of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's
innovative use of stream of consciousness, a style in which the author directly transcribes the
thoughts and sensations that go through a character's mind, rather than simply describing
those sensations from the external standpoint of an observer.
In the first chapter, the very young Stephen is only capable of describing his world in simple
words and phrases.Later, when Stephen is a teenager obsessed with religion, he is able to
think in a clearer, more adult manner. Paragraphs are more logically ordered than in the
opening sections of the novel, and thoughts progress logically. It is only in the final chapter,
when Stephen is in the university, that he seems truly rational. By the end of the novel, Joyce
renders a portrait of a mind that has achieved emotional, intellectual, and artistic adulthood.

The Role of the Artist

Stephen's decision at the end of the novelto leave his family and friends behind and go into
exile in order to become an artistsuggests that Joyce sees the artist as a necessarily isolated
figure. In his decision, Stephen turns his back on his community, refusing to accept the
constraints of political involvement, religious devotion, and family commitment.However,
though the artist is an isolated figure, Stephen's ultimate goal is to give a voice to the very
community that he is leaving.

The Need for Irish Autonomy

Stephen's perception of Ireland's subservience has two effects on his development as an artist.
First, it makes him determined to escape the bonds that his Irish ancestors have
accepted.Second, Stephen's perception makes him determined to use his art to reclaim
autonomy for Ireland. Using the borrowed language of English, he plans to write in a style
that will be both autonomous from England and true to the Irish people.

Flight

Stephen Dedalus's very name embodies the idea of flight. Stephen's namesake, Daedalus, is a
figure from Greek mythology, a renowned craftsman who designs the famed Labyrinth of
Crete for King Minos. Minos keeps Daedalus and his son Icarus imprisoned on Crete, but
Daedalus makes plans to escape by using feathers, twine, and wax to fashion a set of wings
for himself and his son. Daedalus escapes successfully, but Icarus flies too high. The sun's
heat melts the wax holding Icarus's wings together, and he plummets to his death in the
sea.With this mythological reference, Joyce implies that Stephen must always balance his
desire to flee Ireland with the danger of overestimating his own abilitiesthe intellectual
equivalent of Icarus's flight too close to the sun. To diminish the dangers of attempting too
much too soon, Stephen bides his time at the university, developing his aesthetic theory fully
before attempting to leave Ireland and write seriously.
Critica
If we turn to the opening passage of Joyces first novel, we can clearly see how these themes
of national and cultural marginality conspire to create a radically new portrait of the
artist.Immediately, Joyce locates his novel somewhere between the familiar and the strange.
Once upon a time is the standard beginning of folk stories, yet this is no fairy tale. Instead
we occupy the consciousness of a very young child the artist of the title who longs to
insert himself into the narrative his father tells.
Portrait announces from its first page Joyces radical break with the conventions of the
nineteenth-century realist novel. There is no omniscient narrator here, who directs the readers
response. Instead the narrative focuses on a particular consciousness, and is articulated
through the kind of language that such a consciousness would use.Later in Portrait, the
youngStephen hypothesizes that the artist, like the God of creation, remains withinor behind
or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his

fingernails.This Joycean technique of secession from the text is often described as streamof-consciousness writing, yet it is more accurately labelled coloured narrative narrative
infected by the idiom of the character and thereby achieving a curious independence from its
author.
While Joyce avoids the explicit narrative commentary associated with classic realist fiction,
the quasi-autobiographical nature of his novel invites us to puzzle over thenature of the
authors relationship to his creation. At one level, Stephen is a portrait of Joyce as a young
man; any glance at a biography of Joyces early years will show how closely the two share
their family background, education and youthful religious, political and sexual experiences.
Yet Joyces authorial retreat from the text destabilizes any reading of the novel as straight
autobiography, since Joyce is scrupulous in allowing ironic distance to problematize his
depiction of Stephen. The novels episodic rhythms underscore this irony. Divided into five
chapters, each episode apparently ends with an epiphany a moment of sexual, religious or
artistic revelation which could be seen to deepen and enrich Stephens character. Portrait is
thus a radically unstable text, since Joyce deliberately avoids giving his readers an
unequivocal picture of his chief protagonist.
The mixture of styles that begins developing in A Portrait renders memory in ways that
engage readers in a process of looking back critically and also looking forward. The engaged
and engaging mix takes advantage of the diverse, contradictory Irish situation that Stephen
faces in order to displace more single-minded styles that might tend to perpetuate the way
things have been. The shift is from aestheticism, which appears apolitical in its emphasis on
beauty, toward an aesthetic politics, an art that recognizes its embodiment and its
responsibilities within history.
Stephens insight about himself and how he is mistakenly viewed is cognate with an insight
about Wilde that may be true of the artist in general, with these Irish artists as central
instances. In Stephens case, however, the threat to his freedom is not primarily England but
Ireland, whom he calls the old sow that eats her farrow.Rather than trying to be one of us,
he will try to fly by those nets (P 171). His statements here are double. By flight he means
both leaving the earth with the equivalent of wings and a more practical, but necessary, flight,
literal escape from the pressures to conform in Ireland. Fly by suggests avoiding the nets,
but it can also mean flying by means of them, that is, turning them to advantage selectively
and strategically.

His contrasting styles in A Portrait present a character whose experiences regularly involve
opposing forces that seem irreconcilable, such as the violent political and religious
antagonisms that Stephen witnesses during the Christmas dinner in part i. The strongly
divergent aspects of the books language pertain simultaneously, though in different ways, to
the writer who has learned to work with contrasts and to the character whose life and social
context are filled with them. Various judgements about Stephen become possible in the frame
of a new complexity that arises from Joyces differential style for capturing the shifting
qualities of conflict and memory.
At the end of each of A Portraits five parts, Joyce uses elevated language to suggest that
Stephen achieves a momentary insight and intensity through a transforming experience: his
communion with nature and his fellow students after complaining to the Rector at the end of
part i; his sexual initiation in the encounter with a prostitute at the end of part ii; his postconfession, pre-communion peace at the end of part iii; his commitment to art climactically
presented as an encounter with an idealized woman at the end of part iv; and the exclamations
about hopes for the future in mythic and racial terms at the end of Stephens journal.
Atthe start of each succeeding part, Joyce counters ironically the intensity ofthe preceding
conclusion by switching immediately and unexpectedly to a realistic style and realistic details:
the bad smell of Uncle Charless tobacco in part ii; the craving of Stephens belly for food in
part iii; the mechanical, dehumanized character of Stephens religious discipline in part iv;
and in part v the dreary homelife that is the daily context and one frame of reference for
Stephens aesthetic ambitions.
Rather than presenting Stephen explicitly recollecting opposing moments, Joyce depends on
the readers remembering, connecting, and anticipating. And he presents Stephens thoughts
in language that, through repetitions from earlier scenes, suggests that a remembering and
crossingover may be taking place.
In creativity, as Joyce here presents it, fantasy, perception, and memory mingle as imaginative
production. Rather than serving a common purpose of protesting convention, as in the
epiphanies, or of mutually debunking one another, fantasy and realism converge in a style that
renders the attempt to produce something new. The convergence occurs under the auspices of
memory, both explicitly presented and inscribed in phrases repeated from earlier sections.The
flame Stephen attempts to keep burning as he writes is both the visionary intensity of his
dream and the emotion he feels for a real woman. His flame-tending proceeds next to a table

on which, in the midst of composing, he notices a real, burnt-out candle, its tendrils of tallow
and its paper socket, singed by the last flame; he must write out his poem as best he can on
the back of a torn cigarette packet .
Although Stephen rejects nostalgia about a delusory past, he does not present convincingly
the beauty to come. Stephen can laugh at some of his own tendencies in ways that anticipate
Ulysses, but he accepts, as most readers probably also do, the truth of his mothers remark
that he still has much to learn about the heart (P 213). Stephens emotional potential and his
artistic talent remain to be developed when he writes the last, hopeful entries in his journal.
The question remains whether Stephen can take advantage of the disparate conflicting
perspectives and experiences that inform his tale and its telling to forge as the voice of his
race the hybrid style of writing that Joyce constructs as one vehicle for Stephens story. Like
Fanons zone of occult instability, Stephens portrait turns out to be the name of a question
about the future and its relations to the past, about our duty not to escape from history but to
rewrite it and reinvent ourselves.