A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1916
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1916
The novel that invented the modern artist as we know him. James Joyce's semi-autobiographical masterpiece traces Stephen Dedalus from bewildered schoolboy to conscious artist, mapping every excruciating step of his liberation from the Irish Catholic world that shaped him. The prose itself transforms, moving from the fragmented sensory experience of childhood through the heightened ritual language of adolescence, arriving finally at the cool aesthetic detachment of young adulthood. We witness Stephen's agonized relationship with his feckless father, his mother's mute suffering, the cruelty of schoolfellows, and his dawning recognition that the priesthood imposed upon him since birth is not his calling. When this realization finally breaks over him, it feels like a detonation of selfhood. This is both the most personal of Joyce's works and the most universal: every person who has ever felt the need to become someone their family would not recognize will recognize themselves here. The book that made modernist literature possible, and that still burns with the fierce, painful energy of a young man refusing to become what the world demands.
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“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.””
— James Joyce
“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.””
— James Joyce
“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.””
— James Joyce
“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.””
— James Joyce
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.””
— James Joyce
“Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.””
— James Joyce
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.””
— James Joyce
“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.””
— James Joyce
“You can still die when the sun is shining.””
— James Joyce
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Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-e716293e-c6b0-43b9-bb05-a44e17fc953d.Joyce, J. (1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-e716293e-c6b0-43b9-bb05-a44e17fc953dJoyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-e716293e-c6b0-43b9-bb05-a44e17fc953d.
