A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Indispensable. And the scandal of this autobiographical novel hasn’t worn off in a hundred-plus years. Stephen Dedalus is our young man, the self-appointed artist-priest. We see turn-of-the-century Ireland through his eyes and Irish Catholicism, too, each with its special richness and oppressiveness. Ultimately, it’s Stephen’s desire to escape "these nets" that drives his story. He’ll find God in his own way or, failing that, replace him with Art. 

Discovering Joyce in my youth was a revelation. In this fictionalised autobiography, Joyce rejects Yeats’s Irish folk models, seeking to emancipate the individual from the nets of family, religion, and nationality.

Whereas the early Yeats romanticises the idea of blood sacrifice for Mother Ireland, Joyce has his hero, Stephen Dedalus, declare Ireland is the old sow that devours her own farrow. Stephen flees Dublin for Europe, choosing the vocation of the cosmopolitan artist who, from exile, will liberate his benighted nation.

Like Yeats, Joyce remains obsessed with Ireland and the tension between the national and the universal. 

Joyce’s novel is the first of four literary works that helped me to envision myself as a writer. I read it in 11th grade.

The opening of the novel startles the reader because it uses language to depict the point of view of a baby’s first conscious thoughts, listening to a parent calling him by a nickname:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. His father told him that… show more.

Joyce’s first novel is kind of an Irish Catcher in the Rye: a book about sullen adolescence so profoundly resonant with actual adolescence it can turn lonely teenagers – me included – into novelists.

I was sixteen when I first read it and the Dublin it contained, full of rattling political arguments, philosophical waffle, reeking beaches, brothels, boarding schools, and an entire chapter itemizing hell, was recognizable to me even though almost ninety years had passed since it appeared.

Portrait, like other works by Joyce, dignifies the decrepit postcolonial outpost that is Dublin without ever being anything other… show more.

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man published in 1912 might be the best title about being an artist that there is. In the novel we follow the intellectual awakenings of a young man in Dublin, Stephen Dedalus, as he struggles with feelings of lust, thoughts of religion, and his sense of identity. Every writer should read this short, semi- autobiographical novel since Joyce dramatizes the last century’s ideas of what it means to be an artist no matter your gender or religion. Stephen has a lot to deal with. Will he fly too close to the sun,… show more.

It gives me goosebumps to remember reading this book, caressing each wondrous page before turning to the next. The innocent anguish and confusion of Joyce’s language captured Stephan Dedalus's tormented yet profoundly beautiful childhood so perfectly that it made me feel like the book had been written especially for me! Many passages were pure poetry, yet so earthy I could smell the streets and playgrounds of Dublin. This was unlike any of the novels we were reading in school and I made sure to lend it to as many friends as I could – I was that sure they’d love… show more.

Joyce is the writer all aspiring writers must deal with, and this book is far less difficult than the two that followed. It’s also the one that showed me that while others might expect something else for you (in my case, becoming a lawyer or a doctor), the correct path is the one where you follow your heart. Stephen Daedalus turned away from the darkness of the priesthood and toward the light of becoming an artist. In his case, in Joyce’s case, the art was with words.