Themes in Portrait of the Artist

Themes in Portrait of the Artist

Portrait of the Artist is ultimately the story of a

search for true identity. We know from the title

that the protagonist’s fate is to become an

artist, but we still follow the emotional suspense

of his periods of uncertainty and confusion. Our

hero struggles with the sense that there is

some great destiny waiting for him, but he has

difficulty perceiving what it is. His consistent

feeling of difference and increasing alienation

show that he sees himself as someone marked

by fate to stand outside society. Speaking of

society, Joyce also questions the value of Irish

national identity in a country on the brink

One might argue that the only things that

actually happen in Portrait of the Artist are a

series of transformations. One might then argue

that this demonstrates that growing up is

simply a series of transformations. Either way,

transformation in this text is associated with

two things.

 First, it’s related to the slow shift

from childhood to adulthood. Stephen has to

pass through distinct phases before he is an

independent adult. Secondly, transformation is

likened to the process of artistic development;

his intellectual transformations help forge his

identity as an artist and shape his future

writing. The proof of this is Joyce himself –

after all, this story partially stems from his own

experiences.of revOne might guess from the

title that Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Manhas something to do with Youth. This book

is a classic coming-of-age story that allows us

to follow the development of the main

character’s consciousness from childhood to

adulthood. Included in this is a heightened

awareness of what old people wistfully like to

call "the folly of youth." Since this is a very

loosely veiled autobiography, Joyce was

obviously also very aware of the folly of his own

youth, which he demonstrates through this

novel. The book as a whole is a meditation on

the process of growing up; one of its truly great

accomplishments is the almost scientific

precision with which it depicts the protagonist’s

changing mind and body.

Many of the events of this novel are seen

through a haze of murky discontent. Joyce

poses dissatisfaction as a necessity of the

developing artist. Our protagonist’s

unhappiness with his setting, his family, and

most of all, himself, are fundamental to his

eventual transformation from observant child to

blooming writer. Until he realizes that his

vocation is to become a writer, he feels

aimless, alone, and uncertain. However, we get

the feeling that he could never arrive at this

conclusion without undergoing his period of

profound dissatisfaction. It is this lingering

sense of malcontent that forces Joyce’s

character to confront his personal anxieties and

uncertainties in order to get past them.

Stephen’s fixation on language is what alerts us

to his artistic inclinations from the very

beginning of the novel. Both Joyce and his

protagonist demonstrate a deep fascination with

the purely aesthetic elements of language.

Sometimes elements like repetition, rhythm, and

rhyme take over the narrative completely. This

demonstrates the novel’s stance on

Communication: it highlights the arbitrary and

sometimes meaningless ways in which

language works – and doesn’t work. While the

goal of language is to clarify and enlighten, it

doesn’t always succeed and is often misused.

Joyce and many of his Modernist colleagues

(especially T.S. Eliot) were very concerned with

the failure of language to successfully

communicate ideas.

Marx famously wrote that religion is a kind of

drug constructed to keep the masses bovine

(cow-like) and contented, chewing their cud

comfortably and not confronting the true natureof life. Joyce delivers a similarly cynical and

unflinchingly critical picture of religion in

Portrait of the Artist; our hero, albeit in a

markedly un-cow-like and intensely cerebral

fashion, also latches on to religion as a system

of definite explanation