Stephen Dedalus
The artist as a young conscience, proud and unfinished.
Modernism · Novel · 1916
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce
Stephen Dedalus grows from infant sensation to exile, shedding church and nation for a vocation of making. The prose grows up with him.
Künstlerroman
Characters
Cranly
Friend who hears the last arguments before flight.
Themes
Vocation
Art claimed as a priesthood that replaces the one refused.
Silence, exile, cunning
The famous triad of the artist’s weapons.
Motifs
Daedalus in the name, wings in the imagery.
Hellfire rhetoric the book must digest and leave.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.