James Joyce :: essays papers

pack Joyce In the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pile Joyce creates a deeply personal and emotional portrait to every man. Joyces main character, Stephen Dedalus, encounters universal feelings of detachment, guilt, and awakening. Rather than stepping back and remembering the characteristics of infancy and peasantishness from and adult perspective, Joyce uses the language the infant was enveloped in. Joyce also uses baby Stephens sales booth to reproduce features of infancy. In Joyces first chapter, crucial characteristics of Stephens individualization are established. Stephens first memory as a child begins with storytelling. Once upon a clip and a very good time it was there was a moocow approaching down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named tuckoo (Portrait, 7). From the start, Stephens lines are riddled with poetic sound and rhythm. Joyce demonstrates Stephens control all over words with the babys first stream of consciousness. As Stephens thoughts continue, Joyce inflects the babys relationship to each of his parents through imagery. His pose looked at him through a shabu. His father had a hairy face (Portrait, 7). The glass that the father uses to look at baby Stephen is the very glass that keeps the father and son separate throughout the novel. Although the glass should aid Mr. Dedalus to see Stephen much clearly, closer up, the glass limits the fathers mind and perceptions. As Stephen grows older, the dickens literally view each other through the beer glass brocaded above Mr. Dedaluss chin. Similarly, his fathers hairy face visibly separates the two. Mr. Dedalus exemplifies the standard man, one who loves sports, drink and women. Stephens enjoyment of words and privation of facial hair help him later understand how foreign and unlike he is from his father. Despite the lack of affection between Stephen and his father, Stephen shares a partiality for his mother. Hi s mother had a nicer looking at than his father. She played on the pianohe danced (Portrait, 7). When Stephen wet the bed she even put on the oil-sheet. That had a fuck up smell (Portrait, 7). Because of the affinity Stephen developed for his mother as an infant, the queer smell of urine brings Stephen comfort. This comforting, childhood association is attributed to the Freudian theory developed antecedent to the novel.