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A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man: Künstlerroman Modernist Stephen Dedalus Free Indirect Speech

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man
A Künstlerroman in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual
awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce

dispensing with strict realism and making extensive use of free indirect
speech that allows the reader to peer into Stephen's developing
consciousness

The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he comes to


terms with the world[15] in a series of disjointed episodes

Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the
Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven)

Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary entries in the


concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally
found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others

Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind
of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life

Stephen's growth as an individual character is important because through him


Joyce laments Irish society's tendency to force individuals to conform to
types, which some say marks Stephen as a modernist character

Furthermore, the references to Dr Faustus throughout the novel conjure up


something demonic in Stephen renouncing his Catholic faith. When Stephen
stoutly refuses to serve his Easter duty later in the novel, his tone mirrors
characters like Faust and Lucifer in its rebelliousness

According to Ivan Canadas, the epigraph may parallel the heights and depths
that end and begin each chapter, and can be seen to proclaim the interpretive
freedom of the text.
Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.
("And he turned his mind to unknown arts.")
— Ovid, Epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

critics view potentially apparent lack of focus as intentional formlessness


which imitates moral chaos in the developing mind.
the young man experiences various epiphanies, mostly misleading ones.

his destiny is to become not a Catholic priest but a writer, “a priest of eternal
imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body
of everliving life.”

his attempt to represent each stage of the boy’s developing consciousness in


the language through which the child himself perceives the world. Thus, the
narrative itself demonstrates the artist’s exploration of language.

Stephen continually meditates on sights, sounds, smells, and especially


words: green, maroon, suck, queer, Dolan, Heron, foetus, sin, home, Christ,
ale, master, tundish, esthetic, lyrical, epical, dramatic.

The critic Hugh Kenner named Joyce’s version of free indirect discourse the
“Uncle Charles Principle” and illustrated it with this passage: “Every morning,
therefore, uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse but not before he had
creased and brushed scrupulously his back hair and brushed and put on his
tall hat.”
“repaired to the outhouse”
Kenner noted that the expression is what Uncle Charles himself would say

For the most part, the novel seems to be told from the perspective and with
the language of Stephen himself at various ages, but at times, the narrator is
relating not what Stephen himself thinks, but what the character being
described (such as Uncle Charles) thinks, or perhaps what Stephen thinks
that the character thinks, so that we are getting Stephen’s own artistic way of
viewing the world through the minds of others. This complex play with
perspective became characteristic of modernism and is closely related to
Woolf’s later experiments in To the Lighthouse(1927).

Joyce explicitly modeled his techniques on Flaubert’s. If Flaubert leaves the


reader in some doubt as to how to judge Emma Bovary, however, Joyce
gives the reader virtually no external information with which to judge Stephen
Dedalus.

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of


experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of
my race.” Joyce refuses any comment. The reader must decide whether
Stephen will succeed in this glorious goal or whether, like Icarus the son of
Daedalus, his wings will melt and he will fall into the sea

The attempt to render Stephen’s growing consciousness can be seen as a


precursor of the stream- of-consciousness novel, which represents the
thoughts of a character in a sort of continuous present as they pass through
his or her mind. The long time frame and focus on development in Portrait
distinguish it from the stream-of-consciousness novel in this narrower sense,
but passages like Stephen’s diary hint at Joyce’s later experiments.

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