Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Journal #3


After reading more of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I realize what a pain the stream of consciousness technique used on an unreliable narrator is. In this story, you do not experience the events Stephen goes through from in an objective reality. Instead, you are forced into Stephen’s subjective perceptions of his own objective reality that can cloud and distort certain things – or completely veer off in a new direction. For example, when Stephen’s class was playing a sort of history game about the War of the Roses and Stephen starts thinking about how the roses are such pretty colors. He wonders if a green rose could exist and thinks about how pretty the colors pink and lavender are. This train of thought makes the story really all about Stephen and nothing else.  How could it possibly be about anything other than Stephen if the only thing the reader knows about is Stephen?  The story is written in a 3^rd person limited point of view so you only ever get what Stephen does or thinks about. It is really more about thoughts and ideas than it is about plot. I think it actually can help readers possibly get a new perspective of the world. Stephen never really thinks “inside the box”; he takes what normal people consider, well, normal and puts his own little twist on it. Whether it’s focusing on the colors of the roses rather than the game itself, or it’s taking the criticism of his relatives and making a ditty out of it (“pull out his eyes, apologize”) Stephen puts his own unique view on everything he sees. He does not see the world the way other people do, and perhaps this is how Joyce looks at the world as well. It is an interesting way to write a novel and not one that I’ve encountered before so it takes me a while to trudge through certain sections of the book.