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.

Reading - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Journal #2

       A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a story like that of which I have never read before. I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. As always, Joyce’s prose is something to marvel at, but the stream of consciousness technique he employs gets a little…nauseating at times. Well, maybe not nauseating, but it can certainly get confusing. The narrator is unreliable, and he goes off on tangents about seemingly nothing. The whole story seems to be about the main character, Stephen Dedalus, and how he is just completely different from everyone else. He seems to be fascinated with words and in this way could represent Joyce’s own fascination with words. He is always sounding them out in his head, or making ditties out of them, or thinking up poems. In a way one could argue that Joyce’s writing deploys style over substance, and they might actually be right. After spending a summer reading Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, switching to James Joyce is a bit like studying Bach’s Art of Fugue and then jumping right into some sort of free-form jazz. Sure Dickens, like Bach, likes to flex his stylistic muscles in his works, but the reader is ever mindful of exactly where the story is going and although some tough vocabulary is used, it is never confusing. With Joyce however, half the time it seems the story is going nowhere and the other half you realize the story has moved quite a bit without you even noticing. However, when you read Joyce you realize that it becomes impossible to say plot is the key part of literature. The artistic element comes from all of the other aspects. This is another way Joyce has rather blown my mind. Before now, I considered the actual plot to be the be all and end all of a novel. I find myself reading slower now – really paying attention to what is being said, and although it is a very different book than what I’m used to, I think I like it.

Reading - Araby by James Joyce
Journal #1

       This story, as well as the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (also by James Joyce) has rather changed the way I view literature. Before I read this I guess I was under the impression that literature only had value if it made a political or philosophical point, or if it had a clever plot, or if it changed the world somehow. I'm not saying that this story didn't have any of those things, but this story has raw aesthetic appeal like I've never read before. The last line in particular hits hard. “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” That line has stuck with me ever since I first read the story in class. It is just the utter hopelessness of a person who gets relentlessly knocked down by the dullness of ordinary life. First, his uncle comes home late due to work and he can’t leave until nine. Then, he goes a dull train ride and arrives at a bazaar half-closed down. When he approaches the shop he finds that the people there have boring English accents and are having a boring conversation about nothing. His expectations are entirely unmet, none of the magic he was expecting from the bazaar occurred, and he even almost forgets why he came in the first place. This entire letdown of a bazaar gave him an epiphany – that the entire effort was pointless in the first place. It is at that moment when he realizes that (like the bazaar) his expectations of Mangan’s sister will never be met either. In one night all of his optimism is destroyed, and this feeling of despair is put perfectly in the last line of the story. James Joyce is one of the best naturalistic storytellers, he just seems to understand human beings and their emotions, as well as the way people react to certain situations (i.e. THIS is real life... THIS is how THESE people act, and when THESE people interact with THOSE people, something like THIS invariably happens... such is life). Life sucks, especially life by James Joyce.