Paper Summary:

This paper examines the thought behind the books that James Joyce wrote, as well as the very man himself and his life. It highlights how Joyce was short-sighted and how he often used the help of others to finish his books. It also looks at how Joyce's own life influences, such as his bad vision, helped him relate to characters and situations in his books with an emphasis on "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The paper concludes that it is not just his blindness that made Joyce such a strong writer but also his intellectual genius.

From the Paper:

"Joyce's expression of the motif of blindness in describing imperfect human vision is perhaps the most obvious, literal uses of the motif. However, the genius of its implementation lies in the fact that the distorted or failed vision represents a flaw in the character who possesses it. At the beginning of the story, Dedalus' father is described as looking "at (Stephen) through a glass" (Joyce, 19), referring to a monocle. Later, Dedalus, Sr., is mocked by his son as having disastrously weak financial vision, dabbling unsuccessfully as "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a story teller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax gatherer ,a bankrupt."

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