Is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a stream of consciousness novel?
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...
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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.
Yes. It is. As also are many of James Joyce's works.
It is a stream of consciousness novel because the narrator is not only telling a story, but also having a catharsis by expressing his state of mind and animosity, or "consciousness" at the time of the action. Most works of this kind tend to be fictional or semi or totally autobiographical, and you can see that the author, as the narrator, is doing a cathartic revelation.
It is highly psychological, and the mode of narrative is not formal, rather, like the way in which you would speak with yourself and analyze a situation that is personal to you.
What does "stream of consciousness" mean in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"?
Simply put, stream of consciousness is a style of narration that seeks to mirror the messy, random, often illogical form of human thought. Thus, stream of consciousness often defies conventional rules of grammar, and is often quite difficult to read. Some authors often associated with stream of consciousness include James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. The way in which authors use stream of consciousness is often recognizably different (Joyce's version of the technique is not the same as Woolf's, for instance), but any author's use of stream of consciousness generally aims to represent the messy (and sometimes confusing) workings of the human mind as realistically as possible.
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the most famous examples of stream of consciousness narration. In this novel, Joyce's writing style mirrors the evolution and growth of his protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. As such, the beginning of the novel is written in a way that mimics a very young child's simplistic consciousness, while the latter chapters grow progressively sophisticated in order to parallel Stephen's maturation.
As an example of this technique, take a look at the first five paragraphs of the novel:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
He sang that song. That was his song.
When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.
Notice how the narration is stilted and simplistic, and also how it jumps from topic to topic with little notice or logic. While this style might flout the traditional rules of narrative, it also very skillfully mirrors the thought processes of a small child. As such, in this passage Joyce uses a stream of consciousness narrative to represent the thoughts of his young protagonist. Later on, the narrative style grows progressively more mature as Stephen himself matures.
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