A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

   
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
read: circa 2005, re-read 2014
Modern Library #3, Guardian 1000 Novels

Stephen Dedalus, the protoganist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is one of the more insular characters in literature. There are other characters in the novel - his father, some of his teachers, a few classmates - but their threads are vague and mostly irrelevant to the narrative. The story is about Stephen's interior journey, from star pupil at a prep school, to frequenter of whore-houses, to guilt-wracked religious zealot, and finally to the titular artist.

Stephen is drawn to language early in life, not just the meaning but the sounds of the words themselves, even commenting that the lines in his spelling book "were like poetry." When he ultimately writes a villanelle, his experience is that "the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain." James Joyce is known for his use of language for rhythm and sound as well as meaning; we can see some of the foundation for that here.