Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

10 Pages 2388 Words

and reconstructing scenes from his own life to create a portrait of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and serious young boy who gradually defines himself as an artist.Still, Joyce and Stephen have much in common. Both were indelibly marked by their upbringing in drab, proud, Catholic Dublin, a city that harbored dreams of being the capital of an independent nation but which in reality was a backwater ruled by England. Like Stephen, Joyce was the eldest son of a family that slid rapidly down the social and economic ladder. When Joyce was born in 1882, the family was still comfortably off. But its income dwindled fast after Joyce’s sociable, witty, hard-drinking father, John Stanislaus, lost his political job- as Stephen’s father Simon loses his- after the fall of the Irish leader and promoter of independence Charles Stewart Parnell. Although the loss of the post was not directly related to Parnell’s fall, Joyce’s father worshipped “the uncrowned king of Ireland” and blamed his loss on anti-Parnell forces like the Roman Catholic Church. (Joyce portrays the kind of strong emotions Parnell stirred up in theChristmas dinner scene in Chapter One of Portrait of the Artist.) Like Simon Dedalus, the jobless John Stanislaus Joyce was forced to move his family frequently, often leaving rent bills unpaid.Joyce, though, seems to have taken a more cheerful view of his family problems, and to have shown more patience with his irresponsible father, than did his fictional hero. He seems to have inherited some of his father’s temperament; he could clown at times, and he laughed so readily he was called “Sunny Jim.” He also inherited a tenor voice good enough to make him consider a concert career. Many believe that musical talent is responsible for Joyce’s gift for language.Joyce’s father was determined that his son have the finest possible education, and though precarious family finances forced the boy to move from school to school, he r...