Essay on Stephen’s Heroic Quest in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ma

Stephens Heroic Quest in delineation of the Artist as a Young Man ...His mother verbalise -O, Stephen will apologise. Dante said -O, if not, the eagles will come and pull appear his eyes. This utterance, which comes at the climax of the briefly first passage that Joyce presents to us, defines the heroic quest that Stephen (and/or his latent identity as mythic Daedalus) must undertake. He is, in this instance, bound by a strict commandment from above (from the towering grown-ups above him, from the air-borne, attack eagles), from the poets of the past , and - most superficially from his elders, to perform an act of apology. Stephen seals this cosmic agreement with his little song Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. Stephen internalizes his predicament or bequest - by chanting the words that descend to him from layers of higher authority. He shapes the get words with his own voice (wheth er it be out loud or only inside his head), compresses /extractions phrases from the longer syntax, and utilizes rhyme in a pattern repetition. (In short, he has applied a craft.) If his mother, a temporal and exactly parental figure, initiates young Stephens artistic covenant in a ordinary way, Dante (whose real identity in Stephens world is sparsely revealed in this passage) is the inadvertent and incidental avatar of an old poet, or the poetic tradition, or the artist-creator that Stephen (or Joyce, if we treat this work as autobiographical) must become. The implied historic Dante serves as a representative, for Stephen and Joyce, of the poetic c... ...e University of Windsor Review. vol.1, no. 1. Spring, 1965. 1-15. Rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. ed. Dennis Poupard. Detroit Gale question Company, 1985. 16229-234. Litz, A. Walton. mob Joyce. youthful York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966. Peake, C.H. James Joyce The Citizen and The Artist. Stanford Stanf ord University Press, 1977. 56-109. Pope, Deborah. The Misprision of Vision A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce. vol.1. ed. Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. 113-19. The World Book Encyclopedia. New York World Book Inc., 1987. 3. Wells, H.G. James Joyce. The New Republic. March 10, 1917. 34-46. Rpt. in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. ed. Sharon K. Hall. Detroit Gale look for Company, 1980. 3252.