Kyle’s Reviews > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man > Status Update

Outgrowing his parochial family and Jesuit school system, Stephen seems to find his calling as an artist, one who creates his works of art through words. So many of them were confusingly jumbled together in earlier chapters, and yet it is perhaps the most straightforward narrative I have yet encountered with Joyce. The next obstacle in his journey into adulthood is the English language as opposed to his native Irish.

I get that the titular Artist and author are one and the same, an autobiographical account of Joyce growing up in Dublin, but where is the line slanting between the autobio in this graphic account of an insular Stephen resisting the world within which he finds himself? Theatre is a trifle, girls an annoyance, his family a frustration, and most of the third chapter taken up with sermons on St. Xavier’s day.

Young manhood begins inauspiciously with a nursery rhyme and soon fast forwards to Clongowes Wood College with an order of Jesuit thugs ready to beat sense into the witless sinners such as Stephen. He remains a bit behind the discussion of independence-seeking Irish politicians that gets his family worked up and even the extensive endnotes are an abstraction of the lived experience of an artist on the move to Dublin.