A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

There is a germ of things and thoughts that determines flight/fall of one's being ... If Hamlet had it on his sleeve, albeit disinclinedly, then Stephen has it in his shadows, which threaten himself to pass by from a mere distance.

The germ here very much breathes in the ‘vagueness of his wonder', as Stephen would call it; in the stillness of the stare he would elicit when the most important moments of his being's life are discussed or dished out by others but not himself. In this sense of wonderment, which would easily eventually be seen as bewilderment of sorts, Stephen lets the germ to grow.

The style of Joyce's writing here determines quick and fast the slow dropping of words from a certain order, one by one, and persist longer; so that words, as they re-appear, in the parallel tributary of more words and more thoughts, appear in the crystal form of the piece.

Nonetheless for Joyce, the meaning of the tale does not lie in explicating the essential, but it hovers around in the symbolism of the immanent.

Is ‘vagueness' then the point of departure through which Stephen initiates himself in the world; “Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?” Is it the very “dross of earth” that eventually evokes a splitting stinging pain of ‘conscience'. And isn't it in the quagmire of a peculiar setting which Stephen claims to reject in imbibing that his disinterested “soul is born”?

If there is a so called epiphanic moment for the reader of Stephen's account, it certainly gets enmeshed within the stylistic-structural ‘fall' and ‘flight' the protagonist's henceforth constitution of a ‘soul' whose aesthetic consciousness unfolds in the saudadic manifestation of memory enabling him to render art:

“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”

The shadowy vagueness and the disinterested disposition of the son or the student begins to take up something on his own – ‘paper' beckons the ‘pencil' beckons the words that are winged by memories that Stephen endears his life with.

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' is the kind of a book which attempts to resist valuation; what could be termed as epiphanic moments of being, may not readily match the reader's impulse, for the latter would have to partake in it as an experience for its own accord.