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.
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.
From.....
This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 1,060 words. This
study guide contains 26,818 words (approx. 89 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Literature Guide with our A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Access Pass.
