One day, he hides under the dining table, and his mother asks him to apologize for something, but he doesn’t know what. When he grows up, he wants to marry Eileen, the girl next door. His mother plays the piano, and Stephen likes to dance. Little Stephen Dedalus is at home, listening to his father telling stories of “baby tuckoo” and a “moocow,” and singing songs. “This race and this country and this life produced me, he said.Joyce collected “epiphanies” – small, everyday and magical observations that held the possibility of discovering greater connections and insights.The novel references other literary works throughout, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to numerous Greek myths.Especially as a child, Stephen lives in a fantasy world that he realizes is impossible to recreate in reality. Art and reality are often portrayed as at odds in the novel.The novel is strongly autobiographical: Stephen’s development and experiences are, to a large extent, similar to Joyce’s own.In the novel, Joyce experiments with the stream-of-consciousness technique, which he later perfects in Ulysses.The style develops in line with the character: While, initially, the language is childish and naive, it changes to increasingly academic and intellectual the older Stephen gets.The novel describes the emotional and mental development of the main protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, from childhood to independent artist.He eventually leaves the church, university, his parents and his country in order to find his true self. During his time at Jesuit schools and university, he struggles to find his own identity and break free of the culture of his childhood. Stephen grows up in the deeply nationalistic and religious culture of Ireland.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is James Joyce’s first novel and a milestone of modern literary history.With A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce created a masterpiece: high art that still is full of life. Joyce’s debut novel foreshadows what was to follow in its wake: stylistically and intellectually demanding literature that would define the era of Modernism. It is no accident that the main character’s name, Dedalus, is reminiscent of the Dedalus of Greek mythology, who escapes from prison with his self-made wings – though for Stephen, freedom from the confines of his Irish upbringing comes through visits to brothels, philosophical debates and solitary walks along the beach. Joyce follows the development of his alter ego with painstaking precision, from the state of naive childhood to self-confident and independent artist. Many an author has written about their coming of age, but there is hardly anyone who approached this task as uncompromisingly as James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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