A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man
The beginning of the narration starts with “once upon a time and a very good time it was there was moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.....” (3) This playful banter is reminiscent of a nursery rhyme and the reader can speculate that the protagonist is a child. And this notion is then strengthened with the disjoint in the following sentences “she played on the piano the sailor’s horn pipe for him to dance. He danced…..Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante. Dante had two brushes in her press…..The Vances…..they were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table” (3-4). One concedes that the protagonist is a child at the moment of narration, because not only are his sentences mulled together, the subject is also innocent. When he thinks of Eileen, he pronounces he would marry her when they were grown; this sentence is a strong indication of the protagonist’s childhood innocence.
In the next chapter, one sees the protagonist struggle with his innocence. He is teased about whether or not he kisses his mother before he goes to bed. This incident confuses him; he wonders what the right answer is. And as the narration continues, one sees Stephen experiencing sexual awareness and battling with lust, “he had known neither rude male health nor filial piety, nothing stirred within his soul but a cold and cruel and loveless lust” (102). He eventually gives in to his desire and “appeases the fierce longing of his heart….he cared little that he was in mortal sin” (105). He loses his virginity and innocence therein.
The aftermath of the loss of his innocence heralds a stage of shame, a period of sin and emptiness. This particular phase in his life is triggered by the sermons Stephen hears at the religious retreat in honor of St. Francis Xavier. He is convicted by the words of the priest, so much that he is driven to go for confession after a hiatus. He confesses his sin and is relieved of the burden that he had been carrying. This takes him to the stage of piety that he had lost before; in fact, he is so pious that he was approached with the idea of becoming a priest. This however, is only a phase; he, later on, becomes an atheist, and in so doing goes through the process of life in circle.
Stephen, the protagonist, goes through the process every individual goes through: from innocence to losing one’s innocence to trying to gain it back. James Joyce did not rely on the use of plot to project Stephen’s experience; he uses an everyday account of important phases in Stephen’s life to make him more real to the reader. From the squabble of a kid, to the semi-adequacy to form intelligent structure in a teen, to the coming of age of Stephen, one is able to relate with Stephen as a human. Through this, Stephen does not sound like a character in a frictional world; rather he sounds, feels, and projects himself as a real person. One who Joyce is writing a biography about.
Work Cited
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Print.
Matz, Jesse. The Modern Novel: A Short Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Print.
Comments
Post a Comment