We must keep in mind, however, that many of the people and the situations of the novel have been presented in the form of satire. We must also be aware that the author selected this technique to emphasize how the life of an artist differs from that of others who share his world.
In A Portrait, the reader learns through the particular experiences of Stephen Dedalus how an artist perceives his surroundings, as well as his views on faith, family, and country, and how these perceptions often conflict with those prescribed for him by society. As a result, the artist feels distanced from the world. Unfortunately, this feeling of distance and detachment is misconstrued by others to be the prideful attitude of an egoist. Thus the artist, already feeling isolated, is increasingly aware of a certain growing, painful social alienation.
In addition, Stephen's natural, maturing sexual urges confuse him even further. Stephen is a keenly intelligent, sensitive, and eloquent young man, but he also possesses the feelings of urgent sexuality, selfdoubt, and insecurity — all universal emotions which are experienced during the development of the average adolescent male.
Joyce reveals these tumultuous adolescent feelings through a narrative technique called stream-of-consciousness. He takes the reader into both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, showing him the subjective and the objective realities of a situation.
Using Stephen Dedalus, he explores the depths of the human heart. This novel is narrated, for the most part, in the limited omniscient point of view; at the same time, it progresses in form from the lyrical and epical modes of expression and moves finally into the dramatic mode of expression. These "modes of expression" are Stephen's own terms, defining the various kinds of literature; when we encounter them in the novel, we should write down Stephen's definitions and attempt to chart the course of this novel according to its evolving lyrical, epical, and dramatic levels.
Stephen's thoughts, associations, feelings, and language both cerebral and verbal serve as the primary vehicles by which the reader shares with Stephen the pain and pleasures of adolescence, as well as the exhilarating experiences of intellectual, sexual, and spiritual discoveries.
Find the quotes you need to support your essay, or refresh your memory of the book by reading these key quotes. Test your knowledge of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with quizzes about every section, major characters, themes, symbols, and more.
Go further in your study of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with background information, movie adaptations, and links to the best resources around the web. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Summary Read our full plot summary and analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , scene by scene break-downs, and more. Augustine expressed his gratitude to God for turning him away from his dissolute and lustful youth and converting him to asceticism and religion.
To be continued, then, in Ulysses. View all 18 comments. Jan 12, Anthony Vacca rated it really liked it Shelves: , irish , rage-reviews. View all 28 comments. Shelves: reviewed.
I was already grateful to Whoopi Goldberg this week for her reasonable comments about the most recent Sarah Palin ridiculousness, so I feel kind of bitter at having to be grateful for the other half of that daring duo. I had sworn them as my nemeses — minor nemeses, yes, of nowhere near the caliber of Charlie Kaufman , David Lynch , or Harold Bloom , but nemeses nonetheless.
We have all his poetry at home in a book. Why, he's only a rhymester! Everyone knows that Tennyson is the greatest poet. Byron the greatest poet! He's only a poet for uneducated people. All you know about poetry is what you wrote up on the slates in the yard and were going to be sent to the loft for.
You never read a line of anything in your life except a trans, or Boland either. In a moment Stephen was a prisoner. You'd be afraid to open your lips. Afraid of your life. Nash pinioned his arms behind while Boland seized a long cabbage stump which was lying in the gutter.
Struggling and kicking under the cuts of the cane and the blows of the knotty stump Stephen was borne back against a barbed wire fence. His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, half blinded with tears, stumbled on, clenching his fists madly and sobbing. The Grand Inquisitor? I really wish Robin Williams had come and slapped Stephen Dedalus around for a little while somewhere in this book, though. The following passage comes closest to being funny of any passage in the book but still, yawn!
I remember a sentence of Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different.
I hope I am not detaining you. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish? The funnel. I never heard the word in my life. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up.
Upon my word I must. I did not hate this book as much as I thought I would, to be quite honest. It has mostly unbearable parts, but a couple of bearable boogey-man Catholic Church parts. I can handle the dramatic conversion chapter, but mostly Stephen is such a pipsqueak! This book fails to be transcendent in my opinion. By that I mean that I believe it does try to be timeless — and fails.
I know the counterargument is that it is documenting a specific time and culture. I get that. So are The Iliad , Macbeth , and Pride and Prejudice , though, and they are still fun or tragic and reflective of some basic humanity. Things happen in them. A Portrait of the Artist… , if it is reflective of anything, is reflective of self-absorbed young men, and that is a culture I find it impossible to be patient with.
Sorry guys! I think we should go our separate ways. The reader is a slow-talking, simpery-voiced, Joycian. Things I love also include, but are not limited to, baby animals, ice cream, Dr. Seuss , and the Velvet Underground, if you want to know. View all comments. I read this back in high school and a few times since and it blew my mind. The textual maturity grows as Stephen Daedalus grows and it is absolutely captivating.
The scene where his knuckles are beaten in class thank goodness we have moved beyond corporal punishment in schools for the most part! A must read. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of ripening, a story of the complicated and excruciating spiritual struggle. A boy in the world of adults: he finds out that there is injustice, that there are such things as perfidy and hypocrisy… It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a sc A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book of ripening, a story of the complicated and excruciating spiritual struggle.
A boy in the world of adults: he finds out that there is injustice, that there are such things as perfidy and hypocrisy… It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair.
Indoctrination passes as an education: God is above all and there is no free will but only the will of God and everything that is done against the will of God is sin… So eventually, God turns into a frightful monstrosity. That was the work of devils, to scatter his thoughts and overcloud his conscience, assailing him at the gates of the cowardly and sin corrupted flesh: and, praying God timidly to forgive him his weakness, he crawled up on to the bed and, wrapping the blankets closely about him, covered his face again with his hands.
He had sinned. But boy is growing up — he acquires knowledge, he obtains some life experience so his childish and adolescent fears are left behind… Thus a boy becomes a youth full of poetical visions and artistic hopes… Now Stephen Dedalus is capable of doing daedal deeds… His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit.
An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. To become a true artist one must break the chains of all dogmas. View all 3 comments. Jun 10, Kalliope rated it really liked it Shelves: ireland , fiction-english , joycean , , biography. And there he was following the alleys, away from his original filial shell, searching where the way would take him, and there were icons on the walls.
Icons of guilt, icons of duty. Some promised a reality beyond those grey walls announcing that there would be more light — but still imagined. Some pretended a glorious past and a glorious and heroic future for the community -- an imaginary polity.
Captivating nets of restricting nationalism, coined discourses and gelled devotions. He took the tur And there he was following the alleys, away from his original filial shell, searching where the way would take him, and there were icons on the walls. He took the turn of one of those alleys and enjoyed the walk but it left nothing but pleasureless pleasure in his soul.
They were dancing paths that entangled him more and more. He took a side turn, again after that promising light. But he was just getting into darker caves of fear, where guilt there always was: the Minotaur of sin lurking on each of those barren and sordid alleyways. The Order, the militant Order. Fleeing and escaping, not yet flying, but led by the force of hope, a dizzy hope. He met other ghosts in those alleys but they were not more real than the icons.
Some white shone. Pearl white. A feather as small as a word. The fascination led him to other feathers that seemed to mark the way out of the trapping Labyrinth of stilted ideas.
But one has to be careful with words. They can embody banality. Or emptiness. He knew the words of prayer, the words of nationalism. Words had also brought sorrow to that first martyr, Stephanos, the saint from the classical lands of ancient Greece. He was punished for his speech, his utterances. Words exchanged for stones: evil stones, words of evil and stones of god. Words of god. But those feathers, did the sweet Guardian Angel drop them? Or was it the heroic Attican figure with Apollonian wings?
For those feathers of beauty grouped into systems of calming order. They formed an ordered and powerful structure - the syntax of thought. They led the way, clustering into meshes that winged the thoughts.
Inventions could now fly. The wings of text, wings of writing, wings of beauty could help the soul glide away. Diving upward dropping the weight of morality into eternal Stasis. In free pursuit of liberating aesthetics, in all its splendour: with Integritas , Consonantia and Claritas — Wholeness, Harmony and Radiance. I am now rereading the Odyssey in preparation for Ulysses Words are also compared to arrows in Homer's View all 52 comments.
Feb 04, Shine Sebastian rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-i-own , ultimate-favourites , impeccable-language , , classics , wisdom. Words, art, life Life, art, words James Joyce, This book is insightful, poetic, artistic and profound. It is , if I may say so, a tour de force of wisdom and language. I will try to make this review not ridiculously long, but as you can imagine, when a book is this good, there is no way you can write a short review and be satisfied. So let's take a look at Joyce's brilliance, 1.
Language - Joyce's language is fresh and unique, his techniques and style Words, art, life Language - Joyce's language is fresh and unique, his techniques and style a touch of sheer genius. The sentences, especially descriptive ones, are so expressive and vivid, so that the images and scenes are felt so strongly and clearly, oozing out of the pages.
Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with his heart.
So colourful and soothing!! Profoundness, Wisdom and Knowledge - "The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey fringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself.
Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose? It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of body.
Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyound or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths.
Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again. An artist's soul, desperately in want of freedom to express itself wholely and freely, its journey, its waking. Stephen Dedalus, goes down into the dark, bottomless depths of his soul's secrets, his hidden and silent conciousness in repose, his true being, and like his ancient father, the old brilliant artificer, Daedalus, he uses the mighty wings of language and imagination and reason, to emerge anew, a surging new life, an ARTIST!!
View all 9 comments. Sep 25, Paul Bryant rated it liked it Shelves: novels , joyce , autobiographical-novels. BUCK shoves him in the ring. His psychiatrist has explained that contests of physical strength and agility will raise his spirits and shake him out of his depressive spiral.
BUCK : And another where that came from. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably.
I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. O, this is too monotonous! His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway. REF issues a standing count : A one. A two. A three. REF : A four. A five. Is he an American?
O Lor, he is as well. So they are. You look awfy young to me. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head--the right side--is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true.
People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age.
Sometimes I act a lot older than I am--I really do--but people never notice it. No ashplants! So I am! REF : If you do it again! Let me tell you. End of round one. He rouses him, pats him down, hauls him to his feel, and apologises. By the time HOLDEN's vision clears he finds he's been propped in his seat and a beer is in his hand, proffered by the gay crowd whose relish of the contest appears to know no bounds.
General melee ensues. View all 11 comments. Apr 23, Samadrita rated it really liked it Shelves: ireland , and-more , my-god-is-better-than-yours , european-literature , timeless-classics , christianity , autobiographical-biography-memoir , literary-criticism , human-drama , cherished. He longed to let life stream in through the windows of his mind in all its sordid and colorful glory so that he could sift through the layers of feeling, impulse and meaning and find what his restless soul craved for - that shred of truth too primevally pristine for anyone to begrime.
But the world intruded rudely upon his solemn preoccupations, planted seeds of insidious doubt wherever it could find the soft, yielding ground of inchoate perceptions. His oppressors were many and unapprehended - He longed to let life stream in through the windows of his mind in all its sordid and colorful glory so that he could sift through the layers of feeling, impulse and meaning and find what his restless soul craved for - that shred of truth too primevally pristine for anyone to begrime.
His oppressors were many and unapprehended - the cruel compulsions of academic discipline, the acts of adolescent savagery of compeers who were abysmally ill-equipped to deal with a difference of opinion, the steadily visible socioeconomic squalor of the milieu which threatened to blunt his senses and the omnipresent fear of every thought or deed of his being tantamount to execrable heresy.
From without as from within the waters had flowed over his barriers: their tides began once more to jostle fiercely above the crumbled mole. The relentless barrage of catechisms so forcefully dismissive of humanly considerations failed to induce him to self-loathing and guilt; he found a holiness in carnal love and an enduring beauty in the quiet surrender to mortal desire instead.
The labyrinth of diverse lures could no longer throttle his ambition of escaping its narrow confines. Thus, even as friends, enemies and competitors in the arena of life busied themselves with the pursuit of social relevance and prestige, young Stephen Dedalus remained unperturbed.
The author's ideas on women are also quite overtly simplistic and even somewhat patronizing. Thus I choose to save my 5 stars for the artist's heftier and more celebrated tomes. View all 26 comments. First read back in High School — 2 Stars Reread as an adult — 4 Stars This is a Bildungsroman — that is a word I always think sounds fun but I always forget what it means.
I only realized this book is one because of my followup review of it on Wikipedia for extra facts. While my most recent experience with this book is 4 stars, it does get a bit wordy, long winded, repetitive, and maybe even a bit boring at times. I think teenage me was probably needing something a bit more exciting to keep his attention and interest.
Two things I think helped me appreciate this book more this time around: - More life experience to reflect on - much like the main character and author are reflecting on their coming of age - Listening to it made the experience very enjoyable.
Colin Farrell did a great job! I have read one other Joyce Finnegans Wake and that one is complete nonsense. I know someone is going to see that and want to preach at me why it is not, but. View all 17 comments. If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.
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