Analysis Of Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

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The opening passage from Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the artist as a young man’ sketches out elements of the human consciousness, and entraps an essence of the internal voice. Joyce rebelled against conventions of the novel, destabilizing the standard writing style of authoritative third person narrative, electing to focalise on the individual subjective consciousness. This essay aims to explore Joyce’s use of the subjective consciousness to capture human experience, and discusses the complex aesthetic technique involved. Baudelaire’s early sense of modernity as the ‘transient’ and ‘fleeting’ will be engaged in order to analyse the short lived nature of experience and thoughts.

Joyce attempts to depict a child’s consciousness, asserting a voice …show more content…

The passage mimics the thought process, structure, and essence of child’s consciousness in a credible manner. Stephen’s consciousness is deployed through the words of a narrator yet; Joyce remains loyal in depicting the consciousness of a child. Woolf states that Joyce ‘is concerned…to reveal the flickerings of that innermost brain’ (Woolf, 2008.11). The passage is embedded with flickers of images, thoughts, and memories through which the reader is able to achieve glimpses into Stephen’s thought process. This enables an intimacy with the reader, allowing them to access Stephen’s ‘innermost’ thoughts, and receive information directly, without it having been laced with the tone, or opinions of the …show more content…

Parsons argues, “ a writer’s (or more broadly period’s) ideological and epistemological position on the nature of reality will generally determine the narrative approach they take.” (Parsons, 22, 2007) The epoch consciously embraced change, with artists and artisans rebelling against conventions of their art form. Bergson’s theories on consciousness surfaced leading modernists such as Joyce to experiment. Joyce responds to modernity through experimenting with the narrative form subjective consciousness, to capture experience, and its slippery

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