'As pointed out by H.G. Wells, Joyce manages to create a wholly believable character: Stephen Dedalus. The lack of any clear sense of time means that the episodes in Stephen’s life that are shown to the reader are only seen as paintings of his character in certain snapshots of his life. As such, the reader - whether subconsciously or in a more active way - uses these episodes as unique building blocks to piece together Stephen’s character as opposed to using them to build up a more conventional novel. Additionally, this novel is effective because it manages to communicate a broad, political message of the mess that Ireland finds itself in during the late 19th Century in a very accessible way. Using what Wells refers to as the author's 'cloacal obsession', Joyce examines the impact of religion’s heightened importance on the everyday lives of all Irish people and the difficulty that this brings with it.' -Josh Goldstein
'The importance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to the nation of Ireland is perhaps best summed by Joyce himself: a ‘looking glass’ for the Irish people. Injected throughout with a cacophony of Irish slang, Joyce’s revolutionary prose rewrites all the rules of the novel and is interwoven with an insightful view into the Irish synthesis of Catholicism and nationalism. Moreover, not only is this book a commentary on the politics of Ireland as a nation, it is a very close-up, personal experience of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, as a person. This experience is a journey, a bildungsroman, a painting in which we witness, first-hand, the full spectrum of formative development, of childish homesickness, of adolescent sexuality, of youthful self-identification and of knowledgeable repatriation.' – Magnus McDowell
'Once upon a novel and a really quite complicated novel it
was James Joyce decided to write a book about growing up in Ireland. Indeed,
anyone without an accompanying glossary might find it very difficult to
comprehend the opening section; this is caused by a combination of puerile
slang, nonsense words and Irish idiom. This is not to say, however, that the
first section of the book is not intelligent writing; Joyce’s trait of imposing
Stephen’s emotions on the reader seems to be a running theme. Much of the early
part of the book was a tumultuous rush of emotions, so the tranquillity of the
final section was welcome indeed. Stephen the aestheticist was generally very
engaging: I learned much about Aquinas that I had not already known. What was
particularly striking was the decline in means of the family: Stephen’s father
plays a harrowing role of how not to bring up a son and manage a household. The
increase in sophistication of the style along with Stephen’s own development is
so effective at conveying his emotions. Also, the characters presented –
particularly Stephen and his father, but also the cameo role of Uncle Charles
among others – are vivid in the extreme. They turn what could have been rather
drab into something vibrant and engaging.' - Ned Russell
'The use of free indirect style served well to help the
reader to remain invested and centred around Stephen’s perspective before the
transition into a first-person narrator. The constant changing of place and
time with no indication was tricky to understand early in the novel, but for
the sake of the creation of a sense of fragmentation to Stephen’s young memory,
this device had an overall positive effect. The early portion of the novel,
dealing with Stephen’s growing consciousness and increasing knowledge of the
world around him was written with a delightful combination of subtlety,
innocent humour, and insight. Joyce succeeds in subtextually charting Stephen’s
development for the reader, from a barely conscious baby, to a questioning,
increasingly doubtful teenager. The descriptions of Stephen’s responses to
poetry, words and aesthetics are also engagingly written. Throughout the novel,
the presence of a national 'Irish conscience', is interestingly portrayed,
rarely being directly referenced, and yet the embedded Catholicism of the
country, and the background events surrounding Parnell and the Irish Republican
movement serve to shape Stephen’s development, this increasing influence coming
to a head at his eventual artistic revelation, and his realisation that he must
shun these pressures and leave Ireland in order to find fulfilment, a
satisfying while (thankfully) not overtly-neat conclusion of Stephen’s journey
throughout the novel.' - Louis Vaughan
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