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   akannan Teacher
   Middle School

   eNotes Editor

   Indeed, I think that some of the most powerful elements of Joyce's work is his ability to establish the stream of consciousness style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The novel's approach of explaining how Stephen Dedalus achieves consciousness is through Joyce's style of a stream of consciousness.  In the opening pages of the book, we are not given a straight narrative, a seamless understanding that tells us exactly what is happening.  Rather, we are given a series of images told in a narrative that is not entirely coherent.  Moocow, smells, the feeling of an oil sheet, tuckoo are all thrown at us in the opening pages.  While this might be jarring for the reader, it is perfectly appropriate because these pages outline the first moments of Stephen's life, as an infant, when he is becoming more conscious of the world and his place in it.  This style is continued throughout the novel in Stephen's discussion of religion and the family debates about Irish freedom, the experience of sin and consciousness of the other sex, and the establishment of different epiphanies that allow Stephen to gain different forms of consciousness.  The stream of consciousness style Joyce uses maintains the notion that the novel is a bildungsroman, a story about maturation and growth.  It also allows the reader to fully immerse themselves in the life of Stephen without the need for an artificial or distinct narrator.  This technique is mirrored by the philosophical implications of the text.  Joyce writes a modernist work that seeks to question the validity and establishment of structures of power and seeks to create a foundation which critiques these institutional uses of power.  We see this in Joyce's critique of religion and national identity, for example.  The stream of consciousness style is reflective of this as we see that consciousness is not something where there is one definite vision, one definite narration. This notion of consciousness  "is not a seamless fabric; it has deficiencies and gaps that the organism learns to work around," to quote philosopher Daniel Dennett in his understanding of consciousness.  Certainly, Joyce's style is reflective of the philosophy he is seeking to espouse throughout his work.

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   Posted by akannan on Saturday August 1, 2009 at 11:27 AM