James Joyce uses mostly the third-person point of view in the narrative style of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but he keeps that viewpoint limited. Instead of being omniscient, as is often the case with the third person viewpoint, Joyce's outside narrator is limited in his scope. We are inside only Stephen's head, seeing and hearing only what Stephen does.

Joyce keeps us close to his protagonist, so close that the the narrator's own voice ages with Stephen. For example, in the very first lines, the narrator describes the "moocow" coming down the street, using language appropriate to the child-aged Stephen. As Stephen grows, so does the vocabulary of the narrator, showing that he is limited not only to Stephen's point of view but also to Stephen's linguistic abilities.

In chapter 5, the narrative technique shifts to first person. The narrator and narrative style has been solely focused on Stephen and his experience; at the book's end, Joyce goes a step even closer and allows Stephen to narrate in his own voice. The last pages of the book are diary entries of Stephen's, and so they are written in first person, and the outside narrator disappears from the story. The departure of the narrator foreshadows Stephen's own departure from Ireland, and Joyce gives power to his protagonist by allowing him to narrate those final days as a "young man."

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce breaks from traditional narrative forms and uses a third person stream of consciousness style that is less concerned with telling a story and more focused on conveying the experiences of Stephen Dedalus as he matures. For example, at the beginning of the book, as Joyce seeks to convey Stephen Dedalus' experience as a very young child, the text is disorienting and has very little in terms of a coherent narrative. Instead of relaying specific events happening to Dedalus', Joyce gives us the feeling of confusion that comes with young age. While this is a strange technique when compared to simply giving a third person account of what happened to Dedalus as a young child, in many ways, Joyce's approach is more clear to how most people relate to their earliest memories, often having only fragmented images or vague feelings rather than clear accounts of events.

As Dedalus matures, Joyce's narrative techniques and vocabulary become more coherent, but he never drifts from the approach of communicating the experience of being Stephen Dedalus rather than telling a story about Stephen Dedalus.

In addition to other ideas posited by the excellent answers to this question, it's worth considering that the narrative of Portrait is representing several different "kinds" of Stephens. More specifically, each chapter gives us at least one (if not more) new narrative voice, and each of these narrative voices has changed to indicate Stephen's advancing development. Thus, rather than giving us one consistent version of Stephen, he gives us several, each of which is narrated by a different voice with different concerns and different ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Stephen's character is therefore plural in nature, constantly fluctuating, and apparently impossible to pin down and define. In that respect, Joyce's narrative voice has a distinctly "cubist" sensibility, giving us versions of the same character from multiple angles and viewpoints and deconstructing the notion that a stable, singular self exists.

Joyce was a modernist writer, meaning he was consciously breaking with traditional ways of writing; he was experimenting with new forms. Modernist writers were becoming more interested in capturing the interiority of their characters, and this novel reflects that urge. Though told in the third person (with a bit of first-person near the end, in Stephen's diary entries), it is entirely from the point of view of the main character Stephen Dedalus and records what he witnesses using a stream-of-consciousness technique. It is as if a video camera is in Stephen's head, filming everything as he experiences it in a raw, unmediated way. It is the story of Stephen growing up and maturing into an artist, but unlike, say, Dickens in a novel such as Great Expectations, which is also about the maturation of a boy into a man, Joyce doesn't pull the camera back, so to speak, and doesn't give us a wider context. Dickens will show a scene as experienced by the young Pip, then include Pip ruminating on it with his adult consciousness. Joyce simply lets the reader see what Stephen sees at whatever age and does not try to interpret these experiences for us. This brings us closer to Stephen but also leaves it more up to us as readers to sort out and interpret what is happening. 

James Joyce is well known for his unique storytelling abilities, and this novel reinforces this. 

Joyce uses a third-person point of view, but a very unique one.  Events are not told in chronological order, for example.  Also, the narrative focuses on its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus.  What is interesting is that Joyce's diction is directly related to Stephen's age.  For example, at the beginning of the novel, he is very young, perhaps a toddler, so Joyce's diction reflects that. 

Also,  another unique thing about Joyce's narrative is that "[h]is narrative is narrow and tightly focused; he does not tell what is happening but rather tries to show what is happening without explaining the events that he is showing" (Enotes).

Finally, Joyce also uses stream of consciousness (writing as one thinks, which can be very fragmented) and interior monologue (a procession of thoughts in one's mind when one thinks to themselves).

Comment on Joyce's narrative technique in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce uses several narrative techniques, but he largely relies on a third-person narrative that mirrors the inward development of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist. As the story traces Stephen's development from his infancy to his early adult maturation as an artist, the narrative style shifts in tone and diction, signifying (in linguistic terms) the stages and moods of Stephen's consciousness.

For example:

• Early childhood - the narrator reflects Stephen's infant experience with childish phrases ("baby tuckoo" and "moocow") and sing-song rhymes, loosely associating images and events without explanation.
• First sexual encounter - the narrator expresses Stephen's felt pressure of his first sexual experience by paying special attention to bodily attraction ("warm calm rise and fall of her breast") and physical movement ("she bowed his head and joined her lips to his").
• Stephen's religious repentance - the languid, rigid, and (admittedly) boring language in the early sections of chapter 4 matches the rigid, religious discipline of Stephen's suddenly repentant, routine-driven lifestyle.

Elements of the "stream-of-consciousness" narrative technique (which involves a more direct mimicry of the mind's stream-like flow from thought to thought) may be found throughout A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but not to the baffling degree of Joyce's Ulysses. Even so, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man represents one of modernism's most famous attempts at depicting the inner complexities of human experience through the narrative power of language.

Comment on Joyce's narrative technique in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The narrative displayed in Joyce's work is central to understanding the thematic essence of the work.  The idea of the work was to develop the consciousness of the artist in relationship to his surroundings.  There is not a desire to present a totalizing narrative where third person perfection is impacted.  Instead, the narrative is centered on Stephen and the development of his identity in accordance to the world around him.  This is fragmented and not entirely cohesive because of the limitations of individual perception, and in this stylistic element, a major theme concerning  identity formation in the work.  The technique evolves from the opening line of a "moocow" to the political arguments in the family, to the questioning of religious identity, to the epiphanies experienced and the ending of asking "old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."  The narrative technique and approach mirrors toe evolution of Stephen's self and self and his relationship to the world.

What are the narrative techniques used in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

The third person point of view is utilized in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nevertheless, this does not mean there is an omniscient narrative voice like in many literary works before Joyce (for instance, Dickens's novels).  Joyce was not interested in providing a depiction of exterior details and overview of the main action. He desired to focus on the mind of an individual and how the world is perceived through one's thoughts. Therefore, he does not tell us anything; he shows us the world through his characters.

The novel focuses on its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and Joyce's writing and ideas throughout the whole novel are adapted to Stephen's age. For instance, when Stephen is just a young child, at the beginning of the novel, Joyce uses basic vocabulary and imitates children's diction and ideas. In contrast, when Stephen is older, towards the end of the book, the vocabulary and ideas utilized become very sophisticated and complex.

Most importantly, Joyce employs an experimental narrative technique called "stream of consciousness," which presents a character's continuous flow of thoughts as they emerge. 

He also uses interior monologue, by which characters' thoughts and emotions are expressed.

Analyse A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man according to the narrative techniques?

As pointed out already, the key term for reading Portrait of the Artist is stream of consciousness. In stream of consciousness, a narrator follows directly the psychological experience of a character. This can make the reading rather difficult sometimes, and so in Portrait, we may have to slog through some of the more intense rambling. If you take a look at Joyce's later books, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, you'll see the technique taken to its extreme, and most readers would call both of those novels unreadable (although a lot of readers love them).

In Portrait, he uses the stream of consciousness in a very clever way, and you will notice it if you look closely at the grammar, the syntax, and the vocabulary as it develops. You'll see that the style of the narration shifts as the character grows from a toddler to a moody college student. Our first experience with the novel gives us a very childish, nursery-rhyme styled description of a little boy watching cows, made mostly of short, simplistic sentences and infantile wording, such as "tuckoo" and "moocow." By the time we get to the end, we're looking up words in the dictionary as we read the protagonist's long, brooding sentences, packed full of literary and cultural references, sexual implications, philosophical speculations, and questions of guilt and sin and family obligations.

One of the reasons Joyce is considered such a master is the skill with which he manipulated his writing style in this novel to fit the age and the state of mind of his protagonist. The over-arching characteristic of the style in this novel is how it changes throughout.

Analyse A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man according to the narrative techniques?

The novel 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce tells a story of a boy's growing up and his school days through a stream of experiences. Joyce 'narrates' the story in the third person, as if the schoolboy is engaging in a very long monologue. This idea was fairly new at the time, but later came to be explored by other writers such as Virginia Woolf. It was given the title of the 'stream of consciousness' later on. Sometimes it can be hard to follow as the boy flits back and forth through daydreams, early memories and conversation. Some of the fears of punishments for wrongdoing under the version of catholicism at the time are even nightmarish and we see Stephen 'flash back' to these frequently. Look out for instances of past, present and future throughout the great work.