"A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how author, James Joyce makes up for lack of plot with the use of symbolism in his autobiographical novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Joyce tells us, in this short novel, about Stephen's growing self-awareness as a person and as an artist, a growing self-awareness that will cause him by the end of the book to cast off the nationalism, the Catholicism and the sense of clannishness that defines other members of his family and to set off to Paris to become a writer. The paper shows that Joyce's use of symbolism is far more important in conveying what he has to say about these themes than what actually happens in the plot.

From the Paper:

"While it might be tempting to view the image of the bird in Stephen's life (and in the novel) as a relatively straightforward one of liberation and of the release of the authentic self from social bounds, in fact (as Thornton argues) it is a complex and to some extent contradictory one that contains at least three different elements. These are first the threat of punishment (regardless of specific guilt on Stephen's, although given the way in which the novel is embedded in Catholicism, certainly not regardless of the general sin of all humanity in the echoes of the fall of the species from grace); secondly, the metaphor and reality of sight; and thirdly the bird itself, the real birds that appear in Stephen's life and the mythical one that appears in his name (after Thornton)."

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