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Tim O'Brien

206. James Joyce - Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man


Read this (copiously) as an A-level set text about 40 years ago and couldn’t answer the question on it then. I think the question was ‘Does Stephen Daedalus display self-awareness or self-knowledge?’ and at the time I didn’t understand the question, so had to write about ‘The Mill on the Floss’ or Hardy instead.

40 years on, it is a very unfair question, as there is no external measure in the book of any self-knowledge Stephen may or may not have had.

The book is largely an outpouring of Stephen’s self-awareness, which culminates (if I understand it better now?) in the need for him to escape from Ireland, its politics and its pervasive Catholicism in order to become an artist.

Probably a book very much of its time; a lot of interior monologues and not a lot of plot; I am not sure I would re-read.


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