The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

I found the novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man very difficult to read at first , and could make very little sense of it . After doing some background research I have some to understand some of the motives of Joyce , from which it seems that the difficulty was not due to any shortcoming on my part , because I know that that even the most sympathetic critics have faced the same difficulties . Joyce does not intend to offer a conventional narrative . Indeed his motive

is to deconstruct convention . The protagonist of the novel is described as relinquishing all forms of convention , in his effort to forge for himself a new existence in the capacity of a true artist . But Joyce does not want to offer this theme in the conventional mode either . Not only the substance , but the means and the language must also be suffused by the same theme . In its effort not to depend on any cultural norms , it employs the method of stream of consciousness . This is the technique where raw consciousness of thought is seen as the basis for truth , and it is meant that these thought patterns be transposed directly onto the page . It is not to effect realism , as might be thought at first hand Realism is art is a very conscious and calculating mode . The underlying philosophy is better described as existentialism . It recalls the existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre 's epithet existence precedes essence (22 . The existentialists aim to understand pure existence which is yet without essence , or form . It describes exactly the passages in the Portrait which employ the stream of consciousness method . From this point of view I found that a second reading was much easier , only because I was more aware of the motivations of the writer

Another mode which comes to mind is modernism . T . S . Eliot is said to be the instigator of modernism with his 1922 poem The Wasteland . This poem presents us with fragments from the literary cultural tradition of the West , but in a haphazard way , without any seeming coherence , as proclaimed in the poem itself , These fragments I have shored against my ruins (Eliot 69 . Eliot himself admitted that he wrote the poem as a reaction to catastrophe of the Great War , and tried to convey its impact on the Western psyche in general . He believed that conventional art forms had become meaningless in the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history (qtd . in Sigg 182 . The modernist genre that sprung from this poem can be said to be characterized by futility , and the search for transcendental meaning Despite various points of similarity is it wrong classify Joyce as a modernist . Not only does the Portrait appears well before the publication of The Wasteland , it is also composed well before the onset of the Great War , and therefore cannot have been motivated in exactly the same way . Neither is it fragmentary...