A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Summary

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus, a boy from a Catholic Dublin family, from his earliest memories to the eve of his departure from Ireland at about twenty. Its five chapters are written in a style that grows with him, from the nursery language of the opening, in which his father tells him a story about a moocow and baby tuckoo, to the abstract arguments and private diary of the last chapter. In Chapter I Stephen is a small, nearsighted boy at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school. He is shouldered into a cold ditch by an older boy, falls ill and is sent to the infirmary, where he imagines his own death and hears of the death of Parnell. Home for Christmas, he watches the dinner dissolve into a bitter quarrel over Parnell between his devout aunt Dante Riordan on one side and his father Simon Dedalus and Mr. Casey on the other, ending with Mr. Casey's sobs for his dead king. Back at school, after his glasses are broken, the prefect of studies Father Dolan pandies him unjustly, and Stephen goes alone to the rector, Father Conmee, who promises it will not happen again. Chapter II traces the family's slide into debt, removals to Blackrock and to poorer houses in Dublin, Stephen's schooling at Belvedere College, a trip to Cork with his father to sell family property, and his growing restlessness. At sixteen, wandering the streets at night, he goes with a prostitute. In Chapter III the school holds a retreat in honor of St. Francis Xavier. The preacher, Father Arnall, describes death, judgment and the torments of hell at great length; Stephen, terrified, makes his confession in a Capuchin chapel and receives communion. Chapter IV shows him living a life of strict devotion and mortification of the senses. The director of Belvedere invites him to consider a vocation to the Jesuit priesthood; Stephen declines. Walking on the strand at Dollymount, he hears schoolfellows call his strange name, Dedalus, and sees a girl wading in the sea, and he feels called instead to art and life. Chapter V, at University College, presents Stephen in talk with his friends Davin, Lynch and Cranly. He explains to Lynch a theory of beauty drawn from Aquinas, composes a villanelle, refuses his mother's wish that he make his Easter duty, and tells Cranly that he will not serve what he no longer believes in, but will express himself through silence, exile and cunning. The book ends with diary entries as he prepares to leave, calling on his namesake, the old artificer. The novel was serialized in The Egoist in 1914–15 and published in book form in New York by B. W. Huebsch in December 1916.

Top Lessons

• A style that grows with its hero

  Joyce tells Stephen's story in language that matches his age: baby words in Chapter I, schoolboy slang, the overwrought prose of adolescent passion, the sermon's rhetoric, and the cool abstraction of the university arguments. The form itself is a portrait of a developing mind.

• Family, nation and church at one table

  The Christmas dinner of Chapter I shows the forces Stephen will spend the book weighing: a Catholic faith loyal to the bishops, an Irish nationalism grieving for Parnell, and a family whose love is real but quarrelsome. The child watches without understanding what he will later call nets.

• Fear, repentance and its limits

  The retreat sermons of Chapter III move Stephen to genuine repentance and confession, and he gives himself to a rigorous devotional life. Chapter IV shows that devotion becoming anxious and exacting before he turns away from the priesthood. Readers have disagreed about whether Joyce portrays Stephen's later choice as liberation, as pride, or with irony toward both.

• The vocation of the artist

  Stephen's name joins the first Christian martyr and Daedalus, the craftsman of Crete who made wings to escape the labyrinth. The vision of the girl on the strand, the theory of beauty and the final diary entries all build his sense of being called to make something new.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical material is incidental but telling. In Chapter I the small Stephen, chilled after being pushed into the square ditch, falls feverish and is sent to the Clongowes infirmary under Brother Michael, where he imagines his own death and funeral. His poor eyesight leads to the broken glasses and the pandying. The hell sermons of Chapter III describe bodily torment in vivid physical detail, and Stephen's terror, nausea and sleeplessness follow. The exacting devotions of Chapter IV, in which he mortifies each sense and keeps count of his prayers, have been read by some later readers in terms of religious scrupulosity; that is an interpretive reading, and within the novel's own Catholic world scruples were a recognized spiritual difficulty addressed by confessors. In Chapter II, on the trip to Cork, Stephen sees the word Foetus cut into a desk in the anatomy theatre of Queen's College where his father studied medicine.

• Chapter I

  Stephen's fever after the ditch, the infirmary with Brother Michael, and his imagined death and the news of Parnell's death.

• Chapter III

  The retreat sermons on death and hell and Stephen's physical terror and remorse afterwards.

• Chapter IV

  Stephen's systematic mortification of the senses and his anxious accounting of prayers and temptations.