Joyce's Coming of Age

Throughout the first 4 chapters of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen can be seen regressing back to his younger self's thought of things being black and white. At the end of chapter 3 after he makes his confession he thinks about how it would be good to live or die if God wished it so. When he was a child he would put things in categories to help him keep his world in a pattern he could understand. When it was chapter 5 he began to think in more complex ways. If one person read the first 4 chapters of the book and another person read the 5th chapter they would not think that they were the same person. In the last conversation Stephen has with Cranley, Cranley asks Stephen if he believes in the Eucharist and Stephen's answer is that he neither believes or disbelieves. This further indicates that he now knows that not everything has a right answer. This is different from the first scene where Wells asked Stephen if he kissed his Mother where he tried both answers and they both didn't work for him. He has become more and more comfortable with in depth thinking and he better understands how everything isn't black and white. This is a measure of how Stephen comes of age. In Joyce's mind, coming of age is not what today's society thinks the term means, but he believes it to be more about a person finding their place in life. The book is all about Stephen becoming an artist and beginning to think in more abstract ways. Just like different people and cultures have different ideas about what coming of age means, different times have a different view as well.

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  1. HerzogFebruary 2, 2019 at 5:14 PM

    I think this is a great point. We can see in Chapter 1 where Stephen sees everything in black and white as modeled by his family (and Dante), but in Chapter 2 he starts to reach beyond those constraints. But in the next two chapters, following the terrorizing sermon about hell, Stephen reforms his life back to black and white, where he acts much like he did in chapter 1, where he's scared of getting in bed too late for fear of being condemned to hell. If he misses a day of prayer or even thinks out of line, it's like, whoops, guess I'm damned!

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