A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

About story:
Stephen is born and raised in a religious context. He learns to interpret life through religion, through magical thinking, through the process of conforming to god's standards. If he gets some of the numerous rules wrong he will get the ultimate punishment - hell. If he gets all the rules right then he gets the ultimate reward - heaven. But the rule system is obscure, inconsistent with reality, with Stephen and with itself. He tries to twist himself into this weird cruel structure but finds himself turn into a shadow, a husk of a man. He loses interest in reality, he withers. At some point he has a breakthrough and jumps out of his mental jail into a bigger reality. After the release he stumbles around looking for a new mode show more of being but it's not that easy. Other structures also have their problems and limitations. In the end he attaches himself to art and goes off into the sunset.

To me the ending is inconclusive. We don't know if art is the true vocation for Stephen. What if he loses interest in it as well? But this inconclusiveness is kind of realistic. We never really know. We just live as we are until we are somebody else.

About form:
The writing was so beautiful that at times i just had to read it out loud in the most epic and expressive voices i could produce until my throat went out. The description of hell was actually really really terrifying - made me want to avoid it.
I don't think i've read anything like this novel. The combination of beautiful poetic prose with stream of consciousness with lots of skipping around time and place and vague ponderings on obscure feelings - it's like a dream, a dream of being alive. show less

Stephen Dedalus, being James Joyce's alter ego, is a study in personal and spiritual growth. The subtext is one of sexual awakening; a coming of age, if you will. Stephen navigates life with contradictory moments of trepidation and vigor. He believes that in order to be a great artist one needs to suffer for the art. A self imposed exile and abandonment of family is critical for success. Not unlike Joyce's own journey to becoming an accomplished author.
The trick to reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is to not take every sentence as gospel. Every detail is not going to be on some final exam. Read Joyce like you are on an acid trip. Tiptoe across the run-on sentences and uber microscopic details and you will be just fine. If show more it helps, Joyce was experimenting with different ways to write literature. They didn't always make sense. show less

It's the 1890s and Stephen Daedalus lives in Dublin and goes to Catholic school. He is pushed around a bit by the other boys, and is openly disdainful of them, knowing he is superior. Later, he is pushed around by a teacher but stands up for himself. He is attracted to a girl at school, a feeling which leads him to hire prostitutes. He feels great guilt over it and confesses to a priest. Then he becomes extremely pious, refusing to engage with anything he finds enjoyable and forcing himself to do uncomfortable things like smell bad smells. His teachers notice and suggest that he would make a good priest, but he decides he doesn't want to be a priest and stops being pious. He doesn't want to do anything anyone suggest he might like to do show more (be Catholic, not be Catholic, love his mother, etc.), and the girl he likes dares to talk to other men, so he decides he must leave Ireland.

I hated every second of this. It wasn't even fun to hate. I found it incomprehensible on a sentence-level, and on a paragraph-level. Stephen is odious and I couldn't stand him. He clearly thinks he is the only person who has ever had an inner life, especially not women. His only opinion on anything is to oppose it - he hates Catholicism but also hates the idea of not being Catholic, and hates atheists, and hates protestants. He hates Ireland but not for any particular reason, he hates the idea of loving his mother, he hates the rich and hates the poor, he hates athletes and intellectuals, he hates women. He hates his friends who are EXTREMELY patient with him even though all he does is lecture at them and treat them like idiots. He seems to think he is rebelling but no one is really trying to force him to do anything. It reads like the manifesto of a teenage boy with a lot of red flags.

It's very possible (probable) that there are nuances and context that I am missing that make the story make more sense, but the modernist writing style is completely devoid of context so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about that. I could, I suppose, take the time to analyze each sentence one at a time and research its meaning and context, but there's nothing here that leads me to think that would be at all rewarding or worth my time. show less

James Joyce's Ulysses from what I can gather is Ground Zero for all I detest in modern literature: the stream of consciousness technique with its confusing nonsequitors, the lack of quotation marks, and often crudeness. On the other hand, I do remember very much liking his short story collection, Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is midway between Dubliners and Ulysses. In fact, I read it because I decided I wanted to give Ulysses a fair chance and was told reading Portrait first is a must, since it's something of a prequel. It's the coming of age story of Stephen Daedalus, one of three central characters in Ulysses.

Portrait does have those hallmarks of modern literature I feel so much distaste for. Quotation marks are show more replaced with dashes--I read that James Joyce found them "eyesores." So now I know who to curse for all those wannabe artistes utilizing a practice that makes dialogue much, much harder to parse. Thanks ever so much Joyce! Although it was less confusing I admit than with a lot of faux Joyces--Joyce has a way with the rhythm and structure that did make things flow well. And stream of consciousness? Yes, it's there--although with a lighter touch than in say Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and I never found myself going "Huh???" And there are the occasional crudities--prostitutes, lice, fart jokes. We're not in Victoria's Britain anymore!

For all that, yes, I did like this a lot more than I expected. I have to admit it--a lot of the prose really was beautiful and called out to my magpie soul transfixed by the shiny. The title is a misnomer for we don't start with a young man, but with an infant and two-thirds of the book are taken up with childhood and adolescence. And that stream of consciousness technique worked beautifully in the beginning in evoking the mind of a child. Starting with a "once upon a time" fairy tale beginning and ending with the diary entries of the emerging artist, Joyce brilliantly depicts the different stages of a maturing psyche from small boy to devout teen to angry and estranged (and inspired) young man. There were times I wanted to cheer for and hug Stephen--such as when he as a small boy dared to go to the Rector to complain about the brutality of a teacher. And times when I surprisingly could recognize myself in him.

I rather admire aspects of Joyce's writing rather than loving it here enough to call this a true favorite. Among other things, Joyce does go on and on at times. Such as one really, really long drawn-out discussion between Stephen and a friend about aesthetics that made my eyes glaze over. And I still don't much like the modernist touches in Joyce's style. Give me Austen or Forster--or Chabon or Byatt or Atwood for that matter. The brother to William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and father of Don Delillo, E. L. Doctorow, and Cormac McCarthy? Not so much. But even I can admire the psychological richness and the pretty, pretty prose in this one. show less

This novel took me three times as long to read as it might have. A third of my time I spent reading it, a third reading about it, and another third lost in daydreaming and memories as time after time Joyce hit something from my experience so squarely on the nose that it sent me reeling.

It didn't begin at all well. A title that reads like a subtitle, an opening line about a moocow, a stream-of-consciousness narrative with glimpses of scenes in fits and starts ... I feared the whole novel would be like this, until I understood it was a child's apprehension of the world. Confusion swiftly gave way to respect. James Joyce had a great talent for recapturing not only the events of childhood but also the much more difficult to remember show more perceptions, how a young boy takes in and processes what he learns about the world. I would never have recalled it quite this way, and yet it echoes with truth.

The boy ages and the same truth shines from the page with each passing year and event, as how he perceives and what he perceives alter with time. He discovers the world is not black-and-white, that not all arguments have tidy resolutions, that the opposite sex is only human too, that religion cannot provide definitive answers, that destiny calls from within. He's still got his blind spots, though: he's stubborn about letting the world in, about taking responsibility for anyone or caring about his roots, and he's far too full of himself and his accumulated learning. But what's an artist without a surfeit of pride?

I took the title to be self-referential to Joyce, but it's meant more generically; this is the development of a fictional artist's mind from childhood to self-identity as such, although with biographical elements borrowed from Joyce's own life. Surprisingly accessible (if not so much as "Dubliners"), the only sticking part for me were the big long diatribes about hell and damnation which don't really get examined but pull no punches as an example of what was being knocked into Catholic Irish boys' heads, and maybe still are in some dark corners of the world. I'm bound to deeply admire this book, one I'm stunned by for how well it got inside my head and toured me through episodes from my own life, like a tourist guide who remembers me better than I do. show less

How should one review a great classic novel that has stimulated so much analysis and criticism that the paperback version in our library contained more pages devoted to analysis than to the novel itself? I’ll just describe how it affected me personally since I am unlikely to add much to the enormous existing corpus of literary commentary.

I read the book first when I was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame. There I first encountered James Joyce’s semi-stream-of-consciousness technique, which made for quite challenging reading for a college freshman but very enjoyable for a grizzled old lawyer and graduate of a “Great Books” program. This semi-autobiography of Joyce resonated a great deal with my own experience of growing show more up in the Catholic Church.

The book is a growing up and coming-of-age story about Stephen Dedalus, who would also feature in Joyce’s tour de force, Ulysses. Stephen has to establish his individuality apart from the tentacles of family, religion, and country, then - and until quite recently - in the throes of political upheaval.

Stephen argues with family and with friends at college, and this enables us to experience his thoughts on Irish nationalism, poetry, art, sex, and more basically, what he wanted to do with his life. For me, the passage that provide the most fun was the description of a Jesuit’s fire and brimstone description of hell. For one unacquainted with this sort of thing, the passage might read as parody. But I know better: that old Jesuit’s tirade was almost exactly the same sermon I heard 50 years after the book was published at a religious “retreat” that my Catholic high school required me to attend.

Occasionally, Joyce gets carried away with his own extraordinary ability to compose complicated syntax employing his sesquipedalian vocabulary. Like William Faulkner, he sometimes seems to be just showing off. But there are aspects of life that he really, really gets: like the great relief a true believer experiences when his mortal sins are washed away through the sacrament of confession (technically, “Penance”). He also has a meticulously authentic ear for English spoken by Irishmen.

Evaluation: I think this is one of the great novels in English that all truly educated people should read at least once.

(JAB) show less

My reactions to this novel were very mixed. The book is not a conventional novel, and this was Joyce's intention, as you can glean from his conversation about aesthetics in the last chapter. A strange blend of semi-autobiographical material and fiction, with a voice that mimics the age and maturity of the main character, Stephen, and thus changes as he changes. I got the impression that Joyce was writing himself into a story that was a bit different from his true story, in an attempt to reinvent himself through words. Indeed, Stephen dwells on the power of words extensively throughout the novel.

Is the book well written? Yes. Does it follow standard forms of plot and character development? No. Does it complete its own mission of show more becoming something new and original, breaking away from tradition? Yes. Did it always hold my attention? No.

I enjoyed the first chapter, which chronicles Stephen at his youngest age in the book, and is told with a childish perspective, straight forward and yet often fragmentary. I've read that some people have a hard time understanding this section, but I found it easy to interpret, maybe because of the copious notes in my Penguin edition. Chapter 2 waned in interest for me, and yet I was engrossed by Chapter 3 (the infamous hell chapter, which turns many people off), although I wouldn't say that I enjoyed it. It was just very interesting. Then I found Chapter 4 mediocre but with a fantastic ending, and I had to slog my way through most of Chapter 5, which consists of long philosophic debates.

In the end, this is one of those books that I am glad I read because it is masterfully written, and because it rightly occupies an honored position in western literature for its innovation. Also, I hope to read [Ulysses] soon, and this book is its precursor, of sorts. Some of the passages were simply stellar in the imagery and metaphor. The end of Chapter 4, where Stephen experiences his own 'rebirth', was beautiful.

This is also one of those books, though, that took a bit of work to finish, and was not always an enjoyable read. I can appreciate Joyce's skill without agreeing to his life philosophy. In fact, I'm sure that he would despise mine. Stephen is a judgmental young man. (In one section, after he has abandoned his Catholic faith, a friend asks him if he will become a Protestant. His response? "I may have abandoned my faith, but not my self respect." Heh. Thanks for that, Joyce.) I feel accomplished having finished it, but don't plan on a reread. show less