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A Portrait of the Artist as A
Young Man

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Mainly for Joycean scholars

I love the way this novel starts. (See "First lines" at left.)

If you're going to do a biographical story, why not start at the very beginning with the perceptions of an infant? Well, baby tuckoo grows up pretty fast in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and becomes Stephen Dedalus, an obvious stand-in for Joyce himself. Dedalus suffers the oppression of the Catholic Church and the strictures of Irish culture as he grows into an intellectually gifted and rebellious young man. Especially vivid are the passages in which the adolescent Stephen fears his sexual urges are sinful and is terrified as he listens to a sermon detailing his future of eternal punishment in the fires of hell.

It's all very deeply felt and somewhat claustrophobic. The intensely subjective point of view of the opening is maintained through the years, despite the use of third person, until the last few pages which are in diary form.

However this is not the full-blown stream-of-consciousness that Joyce develops in Ulysses. The narrative is sort of halfway between the naturalism of Dubliners and his later approach.

Frankly, having had to study this novel in school and having read it since then on my own as well, I don't think Portrait is particularly rewarding outside an academic environment. Only parts of it come to life. The rest is for Joyce scholars.

— Eric