A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ostensibly is a fictional account of Joyce's early life in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Century. But why go to the trouble of fictionalizing his life? Part of it is in recounting his past the fictionalizing gives him control over it, to define it the way he sees fit. Everything then becomes endowed with meaning. Even something as simple as his name, something given to him at birth, becomes...