A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce(1916)
Extract
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
A baby's world is warm and wet, and the prose begins there, inside a consciousness that cannot yet distinguish itself from sensation. James Joyce published this novel in 1916, tracing Stephen Dedalus from infancy through Catholic schooling and religious terror to the trembling threshold of artistic vocation, and in doing so invented a form that grows with its subject. The language of each chapter matches the age it inhabits: childish babble giving way to schoolyard cruelty, then to the soaring hellfire of a Jesuit retreat, then to the luminous, cadenced prose of a mind discovering beauty as its vocation. It is the portrait not merely of an artist but of consciousness itself learning to make art from the raw material of living.
If you loved this
Salinger writes the same adolescent exile, but Holden never reaches the vocation Stephen finds.
Lawrence draws the same portrait of a young man escaping his origins, but the mother's grip is tighter.
Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus into the day that will define him, but now the city gets the last word.