joyce a portrait of the artist as a young man

When the school director sees a change in his lifestyle, he advises him to join the priesthood, though, it causes severe conflict in his aesthetic taste and religious devotion. His reversion to religion takes over his soul and he starts becoming a true catholic person with a strict lifestyle. He is overcome with guilt and remorse and he believes that the Father was talking to him.

Yet he could not shake off the religious impacts from his psyche and attends a religious retreat where the sermons being delivered shook him to the core. He finds himself mired in some sort of a sinful life as he used to think. The first encounter starts a confrontation between his ideas and the realities existing around him. Soon he experiences his first sexual encounter which changes his thinking about the future after he spends some time with a young prostitute in Dublin. It is because the uncle has informed him of their migration to Dublin, the main city of Ireland, where he starts attending Belvedere, a good school of its time and becomes a school actor and writer. When he spends some time with his uncle, Charles, he comes to know his final days at Clongowes. Nearing his teenage years, Stephan comes to know about the profligacy of his father, Simon and becomes aware that the family prospects are declining fast and that the family is trapped in debts. This instills a healthy self-confidence in him. He gathers courage with the help of his friend and obtains justice after going to the reactor.

When he returns to school, he breaks his glasses and isn’t able to complete his classwork, and gets punished by a cruel prefect. When he is six years old, he visits his home to celebrate Christmas and is invited to sit with the adults at the dinner table for the first time, and the existing political leader, Charles Steward, becomes a hot topic of debate at the dinner table. This is when he starts believing that he is an outsider. He is first pushed into a cesspool by a bullying classmate which leads to him developing fever. He has not adjusted himself to the strict school environment, and the author focuses on key incidents which impacted Stephen’s personality.

As a boy, Stephen has faced heavy impacts of Irish nationalism as well as Catholic Christianity during his educational years at Clongowes Wood College. The author here is showing us the genesis of a future artist’s interpretation of the world. The story of the novel presents the time of the 19 th century ending with Stephan Dedalus, an Irish teenager, deciding to throw away the social constraints to live as an artist.

Joyce a portrait of the artist as a young man