TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > English > Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
Narration
- Narrative voice changes greatly over the course of the book
- The narrator is neither simply the protagonist telling his own story, nor an omniscient outsider capable of describing the general social consensus--rather he is a projection of the individual and idiosyncratic perpective of the protagonist himself.
- Fusion of objective and subjective modes of description
- The diary at the end, written in first person, offers an apparent resolution of the tension: the young man whith his subjective impressions becomes the narrator and a purely subjective first-person account replaces the tainted objectivity that has constituted the narrative up to that point.
- Projection of the consciousness of an individual protagonist
Plot
- lack of; disillusionment plot
- Joyce converts the disillusionment plot structure from a single, momentous event in the life of the protagonist into an indefinite process
- Joyce presents the formation of character itself as a product of social forces, rather than the unique function of the intimate household. Joyce starts with an infant.
- Stephen hopes to overcome the dynamic of disillusionment and to convert the hotstile realizty of expericence into the marterial of his own meaning-making process.
endings of each chapter are triumphs, but this is lost at the begining of the next chapter with uncertainty and conflict
Importance of setting
Ireland - his home & schools (Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College, and the University College at Dubin)
Character Development
- Each chapter Joyce repeats the same pattern of showing Stephen embracing a dream in contempt of reality, then seeing that dream destroyed
- Stephen identifies with Jesus Christ (with Cranly playing John the Baptist, the "precursor"), Napolean, Parnell, the Count of Monte Cristo, Dante, and St. Stephen (the first Christian martyr)
- Stephen's ideas language, and art have been affected by his economic status and his Catholic upbringing
- Archetype of the many 19th cen. novels of disillusionment: the obscure young man from an impoverished but respectable country family, closely identified with the author, who wants to become his country's national novelist; his identification with Napoleon and with the romantic poets; his scorn for the "mob" and for liberal or democratic politics; his loss of innocence; his disappointment in romantic love and his subsequent turn to prostitutes; his prodigality at his devoted family's expense; his attempted treturn to the fold of family and church; the novel's conclusion with his apparent but supstect arrival at maturity
Literary devices/symbolism
- stream of conciousness
- fromlessness
- abrupt tranisions/lack of plot
- impressionism-shaplessness
- mythical Daedalus (Stephen's imaginary flights and the maze of Dublin's streets)
- ironic distance from protagonist
- role of epiphany (arrest and embody artistic meaning in a single moment) Stephen embraces a dream in comtempt of reality and has his dream destroyed
- word association
- movement of book is dialectical--each chapter closes with a synthensis of triumph which is detroyed in the next chapter
- degree of Joyce's irony can't be established with any certainty because Joyce at times admires Stephen and at other times satirizes him--problem is epitomized by Stephen's poem "Villanelle of the Temprtress" (success or failure?)
- Joyce never certain of his attitute toward the protagonist
- Irish vernacular serve to reinforce the reader to the expericene of an Irish Catholic Life
- Latin offical language of Church
- Language plays a critical role in defining Stephen's life
- Stephen, like Deadalus, brilliantly plans his escape from Ireland. He also decides to act independently of his father and religion. This leads him to a life of sin and wrongdoing, Joyce bluntly associated Stephen with the legendary Daedalus when Stephen refers to his "fabulous artificer"
- epiphanya moment of vast revelation for a character
- flashbacks
Relationships between characters
Stephen can't relate to any of the characters
Major themes
- universality
- search for oneself
- Catholic Church
- Ireland (liberation from England)
- Family
- motif of flight, apology, names, and blindness, road, cow, water, woman, flower, and bird
birds can be threatening (Heron, the eagles) images of escape (the birds above the library) or images of beauty (the wading bird-girl of stephen's epiphany in chapter 4), and birds also relate to Deadalus myth
- flower, a neoplatonic symbol for the woman who exemplifies transcendent beauty and thus the poet's path to the divine world, is complicated by stephen's invocation of an artificial "green rose" this relates to the red-green opposition throughout the book: green suggest the imagination, fertility, Ireland, while red suggests British authority, the Church, hellfire...
Stephen's alienation and seperation from his trinity of family, country, and religion.
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