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...

The Joyce industry is very much an institution over here as you might expect; Portrait of the Artist is a regular feature on the Leaving Cert curriculum but Ulysses is probably the most widely unread national epic in history which is such a shame because despite its difficulty it contains the most authentic rendering of the Dublin brogue ever put into print. Its gratifying to learn that much of the slang and street expressions in circulation today; "crawthumper" "spondoolicks"...

On the symbolic level, Stephen, the central character in the Portrait of the Artist, is of course Daedalus, the great artificer who must escape the labyrinth that is Dublin, while in other readings he is a type of proto-martyr, a messianic figure who must suffer at the hands of those who misunderstand him but who will eventually prevail. Alternatively he may be viewed as the victim of what Greville Fulke once described as; "this wearisome condition of humanity, begotten under one law to another...