A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Study Guide

Plot Summary

The young man eventually becoming an artist in James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is the Irish-born Stephen Dedalus. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel charts Stephen's preschool experience to his university years, from an individual at the mercy of events to a person in control of them and himself.

Childhood and School Years

A Portrait devotes the equivalent of only one page to Stephen's pre-school years. The passage contains simple, childlike sentences skipping from subject to subject like a child's attention diverted from object to object. In this short passage, Joyce alludes on one level to Stephen's cultural, political, and familial influences, on another to Stephen's primal joys and fears, and finally to figures of theme and image recurring throughout the book.

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