A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce (1916)
“The novel that grew up with its hero — the prose literally evolves from baby talk to aesthetic philosophy as Stephen Dedalus forges a soul.”
Short Summary
Stephen Dedalus grows from an oversensitive Dublin Catholic schoolboy into a young man who rejects his family, his Church, and his country in order to become an artist. The novel traces his awakening consciousness through five chapters, each written in a prose style that mirrors Stephen's age and intellectual development — baby talk at the start, elaborate aesthetic theory at the end. By the final pages he vows to 'forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'
Detailed Summary
The novel opens with Stephen as a very small child absorbing the world through sensation: a story his father tells him, the smell of the oilsheet on his bed, the colors of political factions at Clongowes Wood College, the Catholic boarding school where he is enrolled far too young. The prose imitate...