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

Stephens Heroic signal in Portrait of the Artist as a Young serviceman ...His mother said -O, Stephen will apologise. Dante said -O, if not, the eagles will come and back off out his eyes. This utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage that Joyce presents to us, defines the fantastic quest that Stephen (and/or his latent identity as mythic Daedalus) m ageinginess undertake. He is, in this instance, bound by a strict precept from above (from the towering grown-ups above him, from the air-borne, attacking 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 phone call sop up out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. Stephen internalizes his predicament or legacy - by chanting the terminology that descend to him from layers of higher authority. He shapes the received w ords with his own component part (whether it be out loud or only inside his head), compresses /extractions phrases from the long-lasting syntax, and utilizes rhyme in a patterned repetition. (In short, he has applied a craft.) If his mother, a temporal and merely parental figure, initiates young Stephens fine covenant in a mundane way, Dante (whose real identity in Stephens world is sparsely revealed in this passage) is the accidental 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 Research Company, 1985. 16229-234. Litz, A. Walton. James Joyce. refreshed York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1966. Peake, C.H. James Joyce Th e Citizen and The Artist. Stanford Stanford 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 earmark 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 Research Company, 1980. 3252.