An Introduction to
A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
Based on Hugh Kenner’s introduction
Narration
 The narrator is different than expected. Not first
person- no “I”. So it must be third person, but thirdperson narrators are supposed to be reliable; they
give us the truth; they don’t tend to talk about
moocows and hairy faces in childish ways; they don’t
tend to evolve as the protagonist grows and develops
adding literary sophistication each chapter. So why?
Why would Joyce choose to do this? Who is
narrating? What does an evolving (therefore
imperfect) narrator suggest?
A Good Editor
 The first draft was 913
pages and 25 chapters
long. The entire finished
product took 10 years to
complete
Rembrandt’s Painting “A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man”
 Rembrandt would fix his gaze in the mirror to the
world behind the mirror as he painted. Joyce’s use
of the title may suggest the following chiasmic
structure:
Background
Dublin
Painter
Joyce
Mirror
Painter’s Image
Stephen
Background Image
“Dublin”
Chiasmus
 Biblical Poetry Structure
 ABBA or ABCCBA or ABCDDCBA… A mirror
image.
 Portrait is riddled with chiasmus, (“Apologise, pull
out his eyes, pull out his eyes, Apologise.”)
 Even the structure of the novel itself is chiasmic.
(Parts two and four both end with images of
women; parts three and five end with men.) I
 In the center of the middle chapter lies the
passage: “The preacher took a chainless watch
from a pocket within his soutane and, having
considered its dial for a moment in silence, placed
it silently before him on the table.”
Silence
 Could it be silence at the center? Time?
Some combination of the two? What is the
mirror? (Joyce used silence as a chiasmic
center in Finnegan’s Wake)
 Are books inherently silent? How does a book
compare to a painting? Which one is more
silent? What other reasons might he have
chosen to fixate on silence? Why are we
asking so many questions? What time is it?
Where are my car keys?
Developmental Progress
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Progression of senses in chapter one:
Hearing:
the story
Sight:
the father’s face
Taste:
lemon platt
Touch:
warm and cold
Smell:
the oilsheet
Why are they in this order? What is the
significance of their development?
Development of Gradation:
 First warm then cold
 “His mother had a nicer smell than his father”
 “Uncle Charles and Dante were older than his father
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and mother but Uncle Charles was older than Dante”
“The Vances lived in number seven. They had a
different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father
and mother. ”
“When I grow up I’ll be a father, when she grows up,
she’ll be a mother.”
“When he was grown up, he was going to marry
Eileen”
Why does Joyce highlight this relationship-oriented
development?
Male/Female Chapters:

Odd-numbered chapters appeal to a
father. Even-numbered chapters end with
women
Women
 Chapter two ends with Stephen’ s loss of virginity to an
anonymous harlot. Chapter four ends with Stephen looking at
a girl standing in the water, “alone and still, gazing out to sea.”
Right after he has realized that the priesthood is not for him.

“A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still,
gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had
changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.
Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and
pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned
itself as a sign upon her flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft hued
as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white
fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white
down. Her slate blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist
and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft
and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark
plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish,
and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”
Female Analysis
 Notice how he creates her. He doesn’t just describe
her; he fashions a beautiful creature from the bottom
up as he looks at a real-life girl being natural. Why
create a bird-like creature? How might this tie to the
mythology to which he is attached? Why did he take
great pains to give her the body of a bird, but then
use “girlish” twice before describing her hair and
face? Also, we see here Joyce’s ability to mirror the
rush of a juvenile crush- the overstatement and
rhapsodizing of a teenager (a talented teenager, but
still obviously young.) Is he romanticizing her (as
Gretta Conroy in “The Dead”?) or is he seeing a
woman as she truly is for the first time (epiphany)?
…flight…
Dedalus Name Choice
 Joyce grew up watching a Professor Fitzgerald’s failed attempts
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at flight. Around that time, he learned about the stories of Ovid’s
Daedalus (Daidalos in Greek: “cunningly wrought”)- the famous
inventor. There are 3 main stories:
Queen Pasiphae of Crete was under a spell, and desired to
couple with a bull so she hired Daedalus to build her a wooden
one she could hide inside. The plan worked and she gave birth
to the Minotaur.
Daedalus created a labrynth in which the Minotaur could be
confined.
Daedalus ends up locked in the labrynth himself. He and his son
Icarus escape on wings Daedalus creates from wax and
feathers. Icarus ignores Daedalus’ advice not to fly too close to
the sun, and Icarus drowns before Daedalus can save him.
What kind of man was Daedalus? What kind of man chooses
this to be the name of his alter-ego?
James Joyce’s Father
Get to
know me!
The Male Figures
 The last line of the book is a diary entry of Stephen’s
written on the eve of his departure from Ireland to
Paris. It reads:

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever
in good stead.” Compare to John 17:5 “And now,
Father, do thou exalt me at they own side…” from the
Vigil of Ascension Day where the Son addresses the
Father.
 …and compare to the section in chapter 4…
Daedalus
 “Now as never before, his strange name seemed to him a
prophecy…Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he
seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a
winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing
the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a
page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a
hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of
the end he had been born to serve and had been following
through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of
the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish
matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable
being?”
Fathers
 Has Stephen selected a substitute father? Is he speaking to the
Greek Daedalus, or Simon Dedalus, his father, in the final
entry? If he is speaking to the Greek, what is the tyrannized
island from which he is fleeing? Who or what is the drowned
Icarus? Why the allusion to a Biblical father and son? What
might that suggest about the relationship? What about the first
line of the book and the moocow present in it? His father told
him about the moocow…compare to the wooden cow built by
Daedalus- the one that started his woes. And what about all
the other Fathers he will encounter: Father Dolan beats him, he
protests to Father Conmee, a nameless father delivers a
scathing sermon that has Stephen confess to another
nameless Father? So at the end of the book when he speaks to
the unnamed Father- are we correct to assume that it is his
own biological father?
James Joyce at age 2
I’m already
smarter
than you.
Joyce at age 6
How do you
like me now?
With his Buddies at School
Clongowes school…originally a castle
Clongowes Wood College
Joyce at
Graduation
Joyce at 22
Getting Older
Dead…?
The Minotaur. Jan Parker (b.1941).
The Minotaur
George
Frederick
Watts, 1885.
Tate Gallery,
London.
Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Stamnos by the Kleophrades Painter, c.500450 BCE. British Museum, London.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Approximately 1580. Hans Bol
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558. Pieter Bruegel
Daedalus watches Icarus Fall
Solis designed 178 woodcuts in all for this version of the Metamorphoses.
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