A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man: Künstlerroman Modernist Stephen Dedalus Free Indirect Speech
A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man: Künstlerroman Modernist Stephen Dedalus Free Indirect Speech
A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man: Künstlerroman Modernist Stephen Dedalus Free Indirect Speech
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
Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the
Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven)
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
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
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.”
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).