A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man belongs to the kind of fiction known
as the ‘Bildungsroman’, the novel of formation (the novel of growth),
describing a character’s struggle from childhood towards maturity. Such novels
had been written before: for example, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister,
Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feveral, Samuel Butler’s The Way of
All Flesh. The subject (The theme) of these novels is sensitive youth who
is at first shaped by his environment but who soon becomes conscious of its
pressure and rebels against it, in order to try to find his own identity or
individuality. The title of the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man consists the similar subject (theme) - the portraiture of the
development of a young man as an artist through various events. It is the
development of a young Stephen from ‘creature’ to ‘creator’. The book
necessarily describes the agony of the artist, his sensitivity, his passion,
his superciliousness, his necessary irresponsibility, his struggling to raise
himself above his companions.
The novel is
the story of how a gifted, imaginative and brilliant misfit liberates himself
from the chains of family, church and country, and starts as an exile to
achieve his vocation. The first chapter is a record of Stephen’s childhood.
Here the fear of authority is seen in the domestic atmosphere. ‘He hides under
the table’ and the only way to escape punishment was ‘to submit’. The little
boy is surrounded by grownups who have rigid readymade standards of conduct to
which he must conform. However, Stephen scores a triumph when, often being
unjustly beaten by Father Dolan, he reports the cruelty to the rector and
obtain the latter’s support. He feels happy and free.
