Joyces A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man Critical Thinkings Examples

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a multipart publication history. It comes from short stories Dubliners and a draft novel Stephen Hero. The very title reminds us Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Though novels obviously are quite different, but they share some concerns for style, plot, content, and aesthetics.
There was a copy of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in Joyce’s library. The novels consider aesthetics theory, while first critics thought them to be immoral. Both novels refer to Irish struggle against British colonization. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a notably aesthetic response to Wilde's the most obvious aesthetic work. In general, Chapter V, Joyce presents his view on stasis and kinetic art as well as Wilde agues his aesthetic ideas in Dorian Gray and “Preface” to the novel. Both authors mock kinetic art, though they have some features of it. Beauty is an ideal for them. Both writers put forward the idea that the artist remains in his creations of Beauty invisibly, though main characters are evident in their pieces of art. Both writers invite the reader to interpret the level of irony and seriousness of their aesthetic views. Joyce let to read between lines the irony of Stephen’s story. Wilde uses dramatic irony when the reader knows more than the characters of the novel.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce makes use of modernist technique “stream of consciousness” and presents some innovations of it. He shows the development of Stephen’s consciousness, but restricts the awareness of it at a certain point in time. Joyce uses associations, changes of thoughts, and language to transfer Stephen’s state of mind indirectly.
Joyce also uses another stylistic technique “the epiphany”. It is an essential idea of stasis in aesthetic experience, a moment of a sudden, striking understanding. It occurs and enables a change the awareness of the world by the character.