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    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    Ebook310 pages5 hours

    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    By James Joyce

    3.5/5

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    Originally published in serial format in “The Egoist” between 1914 and 1915, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” is the semi-autobiographical portrayal of James Joyce’s early upbringing as an Irish Catholic in late 19th century and early 20th century Dublin. The novel was originally planned as a 63-chapter autobiographical novel in a realistic style entitled “Stephen Hero” however Joyce reworked the novel into five condensed chapters, dispensing with the strict realism which he originally planned in favor of the use of free indirect speech, a narrative style which allows the reader to peer into the developing mind of the protagonist. At the center of the novel is Stephen Dedalus, whose life, based on Joyce’s own experiences, is depicted from its various stages starting in childhood and moving through early adulthood. The language of the novel changes throughout the book to correspond with the artistic development of Stephen Dedalus as he ages and matures. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is a masterful depiction of the process of self-discovery and rebellion against authority that is indicative of youth, one which would establish Joyce as a central figure of the modernist literary movement. This edition includes a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateSep 21, 2020
    ISBN9781420977004
    Author

    James Joyce

    James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He came from a reasonably wealthy family which, predominantly because of the recklessness of Joyce's father John, was soon plunged into financial hardship. The young Joyce attended Clongowes College, Belvedere College and, eventually, University College, Dublin. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, and eloped with her to Croatia. From this point until the end of his life, Joyce lived as an exile, moving from Trieste to Rome, and then to Zurich and Paris. His major works are Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan's Wake (1939). He died in 1941, by which time he had come to be regarded as one of the greatest novelists the world ever produced.

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    Reviews for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      How should one review a great classic novel that has stimulated so much analysis and criticism that the paperback version in our library contained more pages devoted to analysis than to the novel itself? I’ll just describe how it affected me personally since I am unlikely to add much to the enormous existing corpus of literary commentary.I read the book first when I was a freshman at the University of Notre Dame. There I first encountered James Joyce’s semi-stream-of-consciousness technique, which made for quite challenging reading for a college freshman but very enjoyable for a grizzled old lawyer and graduate of a “Great Books” program. This semi-autobiography of Joyce resonated a great deal with my own experience of growing up in the Catholic Church.The book is a growing up and coming-of-age story about Stephen Dedalus, who would also feature in Joyce’s tour de force, Ulysses. Stephen has to establish his individuality apart from the tentacles of family, religion, and country, then - and until quite recently - in the throes of political upheaval.Stephen argues with family and with friends at college, and this enables us to experience his thoughts on Irish nationalism, poetry, art, sex, and more basically, what he wanted to do with his life. For me, the passage that provide the most fun was the description of a Jesuit’s fire and brimstone description of hell. For one unacquainted with this sort of thing, the passage might read as parody. But I know better: that old Jesuit’s tirade was almost exactly the same sermon I heard 50 years after the book was published at a religious “retreat” that my Catholic high school required me to attend. Occasionally, Joyce gets carried away with his own extraordinary ability to compose complicated syntax employing his sesquipedalian vocabulary. Like William Faulkner, he sometimes seems to be just showing off. But there are aspects of life that he really, really gets: like the great relief a true believer experiences when his mortal sins are washed away through the sacrament of confession (technically, “Penance”). He also has a meticulously authentic ear for English spoken by Irishmen.Evaluation: I think this is one of the great novels in English that all truly educated people should read at least once. (JAB)
    • 3/5
      Not an easy read. It took Joyce 10 years to write, and it shows.The prose doesn't really flow. But there are other rewards. It's like Joyce is writing in the style of an impressionist painter - the objective is convey a general impression, a feeling, rather than to be explicit and direct. Once the reader accepts this contract with the author, things move along better!In the end I had a vivid picture of a difficult childhood, with a father falling apart with drink, a mother struggling with the loss of faith of her son, and the author gaining the confidence to rebel against conventional expectations.Good stuff, but just not an easy read!
    • 4/5
      I kind of doomed myself reading Ulysses first. I loved that book so much and I loved this book as well, but I can't seem to give anything else by James Joyce a full five star rating. This book was great, but not as great as Ulysses, I thought.

      What I liked better was the fact this was an easier read. It's only five chapters and less than 300 pages...unlike his other book. It's not that confusing to figure out either. I still like Ulysses better though. I felt like that was his magnum opus. However, this was his first novel.

      Some day I'll get around to reading Finnegans Wake. I've read the Dubliners too, which again I didn't care for as much because I read Ulysses first.
    • 4/5
      I'll tell the truth: Not all of this novel is exciting stuff. A lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing that seems to meander about before getting to any kind of a point.But that's intentional. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young Irish writer from his childhood to his early adult years in the early 20th century. This young man is working out his own belief system, his own philosophy and thoughts about religion and artistry, and rarely does such a thought process occur directly and expediently.Thus, the rambling text.But that's not to say there's nothing of import to be found here. If nothing else, this short novel shows the budding work of James Joyce as he builds his writing strengths and style that will eventually become more apparent in his longer, better knows works, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
    • 3/5
      It says something for this book that as I was re-reading it I kept feeling like I was, for instance, riding home on a Melbourne tram, or sitting at a university coffee shop: yes, I was obsessed with this book in my late teens and early twenties. Voila: the strength of the book, and its weakness.

      In short, Joyce is groping toward stylistic tools that really only come into their own (if I remember correctly) in Ulysses--the deep embedding of characters' words in the narrative voice, the intense structuring of a book, and the willingness to vary form). All well and good, and certainly better than the standard 19th century stuff.

      But young-I had no freaking idea that that was going on; what young-I responded to was the ideas, because the Young Man will respond to adolescent thoughts. Probably the only critical problem worth arguing about with this book is how seriously we're meant to take Daedalus's epiphanies (I cheat by using that word). The introduction to my Oxford World's Classics edition tries to avoid taking them too seriously. The book is in the third person, so "a small but significant space opens up between character and narrator... in maintaining this space Joyce avoids reinforcing those old humanist cliches of identity as wholly self-generated, of the individual existing independent of the strictures of history, culture and ideology."

      Well, I disagree.* The book's structure, I think, points its reader to an understanding of Daedalus that is not in the least ironic. He claims that he shall try to "fly by those nets" of "nationality, language, religion," and almost every encounter in the book is tied in to one of those nets. At family gatherings, people discuss nationality and religion; at school, everything is tied in to language. Daedalus sloughs these responsibilities and duties one by one over the course of the novel--the structure, as I said, is very impressive--before finally declaring himself free of them. He "will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church." And so on. He checks out a girl on the beach, and she is hot. Q. E. D.

      In short, Joyce seems to have gone to a little too much trouble if flying by the nets is really a joke. It's not a joke, it's a standard teenage dream of absolute freedom, that I'm sure Joyce never gave up. The most gripping parts of PAYM appeal to our worst illusions.

      But there are less gripping parts that make the book worthwhile. Another interesting structural point, for instance, ties in to Daedalus's somewhat Hegelian description of literature. It begins, he suggests, with the lyric, "the simplest verbal vesture of an instant emotion, a rhythmical cry... He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion." The next stage is the epic, "when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progreses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others." The final form, however, is the dramatic, "life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination."

      PAYM starts with childish words spoken childishly, little more than a cry; as it develops, the artist broods (at exhausting length) on himself, but fails to gain distance from himself or others. According to Daedalus's own understanding, then, PAYM is underdeveloped. At the end of the book, he has only just managed to get to the point where he *might* be able to reproject life from his imagination; up till then, the book, and Daedalus himself, have languished at an inferior artistic stage.

      And this, I think, is why one should read PAYM before Ulysses: it is the underdeveloped, self-obsessed, sincere version of the actual masterpiece. Even according to its own ideas, it isn't very good.





      * And, because I'm feeling verbose, I'll give you two disagreements for the price of one. The problem is not one with 'humanist cliches,' which makes it sound as if the problem is Daedalus not understanding the strictures. The problem is that this understanding of individualism is itself a product of those strictures. I'd argue that (paraphrase of an apocryphal story) individualism would be a good thing, but it's going to take a lot of history before we can get there. Someone needs to cut off my word supply for a while.
    • 4/5
      I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.In its historical context, Portrait of the Artist is groundbreaking. As it reads now, there is a self-interest that becomes a little too much to stomach after awhile. The most powerful moments occur during Stephen Dedalus's formative years as a sensitive youth somewhat set apart from his contemporaries, as illustrated by his defense of Byron's poetry against accusations of blasphemy. His quest for a new aesthetic in his later years feels trite and somewhat self-important by contrast. Obviously, my bias as a 21st century reader is difficult to overcome, but I've read so many solipsistic Künstlerroman in my lifetime that it's hard to be objective. Though, to be fair, almost all of them were after Joyce, so I suppose I would have felt differently had I read this one first.
    • 3/5
      Formally brilliant, this exemplar of modernist prose is also tremendously dark, at times tedious, and at others esoteric.
    • 5/5
      I am usually not a fan of big celebrities reading the classics. They tend to make it about the performance and not the work. Not so with Colin Farrell's brilliant rendition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Farrell's tone is deadpan and understated. His reading makes the work sound as if it were written yesterday. Extremely entertaining and equally sublime.
    • 2/5
      I'm going to admit that I got nothing out of this book. You are immediately thrown into the life of Stephen Dedalus and I really didn't care a bit. It's short, which is a blessing, but is full of long tirades/philosophical discussions of family, country, sex and attraction, and the church. There are moments of pretty writing, but I wasn't at all invested in the character before it was all too dramatic. I've read other books in this vein that I love - like Proust and Woolf and the part of Dorothy Richardson that I've read so far - but this I just couldn't connect with. Does not make me look forward to Ulysses, which I've always meant to read some day.
    • 4/5
      Despite having been a professor of literature, I haven't read much by James Joyce. I loved his story collection, Dubliners, but I've never tackled what are considered his great novels--and I'm not really sure that I want to. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a short novel that showcases Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style in an accessible way. It's the story of his later hero, Stephen Daedalus, from childhood through his university years. I would agree with those who say that it's tied to a particular time and place (Ireland in the early 20th century); note, for example, Stephen's idolization of Parnell and the overwhelming influence of the Catholic church. Yet many of the struggles young Stephen goes through, such as breaking out from under his parents' wings and finding his own place in the world, are still prevalent for the youth of today. There's a lot of humor in the novel that helps it to rise above the usual coming of age story.I listened to the book on audio, wonderfully read by Colin Farrell, an actor of whom I'm not usually fond. One rather funny note: When I originally downloaded the book, the cover title appears as 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman"! I see that someone must have reported the error and a correction has been made. I usually delete books once I've read them, but this one will stay on my iTunes for the novelty factor.
    • 3/5
      I have never read James Joyce before and I had heard that A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man is considered to be his most accessible work so I decided this was where I would start with this author. In this book we follow the early years of Irishman Stephen Dedalus, starting from his boyhood and taking us through to the end of his university years. It is apparent immediately that James Joyce is a master wordsmith. His writing paints vivid pictures but I disagree with those who call this book timeless. I felt it was quite dated and specific to it’s time and place. It is a barely concealed autobiographical piece and takes the main character through his adolescence while he searches for his own identity. His views on family, religion and the very essence of being Irish clearly date this piece as early 20th century writing. Joyce is brilliant but I struggled through this short and quite readable book so I am not reassured that I will appreciate his more complex works and I expect they will be pushed to the bottom of the 1,001 pile.
    • 3/5
      An autobiographical novel, it is very conventional compared to where he was going for the rest of his life. He chooses his framework characters, the male parts of the Daedalus family, and thyeir relationships to the growing Stephen.
    • 3/5
      (Original Review, 1981-02-16)"April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."How much I love/hate Joyce when I read about him...how could he have denied his mother on her deathbed? That act disturbed me - he did not even kneel when she died.I am not speaking of hypocrisy here just thinking of a young poseur who was thinking of himself above all - as you do at that age - especially if you are the ''favourite'. How much are the writings of Joyce autobiographical? Is the 'real 'Stephen Dedalus - AKA Joyce - a 'self-obsessed arsehole' - and did Joyce realise that about himself during his writing? As regards the Portrait Joyce changed the original title from ‘Stephen Hero’ - why did he do that? When did Stephen stop being a Hero?Read it again recently - skipped loads of 'the sermon because being brought up a Catholic have kind of heard it all before but have never been on a Retreat where apparently, in the olden days, you would receive the hell-fire message in spades. I found it interesting in the book that Stephen had to find an anonymous confessor to his 'sins'. He seemed too proud or ashamed to confess to a priest at the school who may have recognised his voice.I think one of the best things I learned from The Portrait was how much Joyce loved his jovial, irascible Father. The last chapter in The Portrait seems a bit of a 'cop-out' with its diary entries...a bit rushed-but maybe that was all meant.The last entry is particularly poignant (vide quote above)The bits that stick in my mind aside from the obvious passages (Hell Fire Sermon ) are the childhood passages, Dedalus remembering his uncles' tobacco smoke, listening to and trying to make sense of the adults arguing about current affairs as a bystander, the bewilderment of starting a new and strange school and trying to understand and navigate the adult rules and language of the constitution chimed with my own memories of childhood. The child is the father of the man, I think Joyce says we cannot shake off these experiences, they form who we are. You are always going to be an exile from them even if you leave physically and geographically.
    • 4/5
      The rhythm and detail of Joyce is here as he captures the passion, extremism, and narcissism of the adolescent mind.
    • 3/5
      When I first started reading this book I really enjoyed it, I lost myself in the flow of the writing. However, towards the middle my interest was lost, not so due to the heavy prose about sinners & hell, although I did think it was overdone, it was more the long soliloquies about things such as the meaning of beauty or the works of classic writers & philosophers. They just seemed self indulgent & didn't bring anything to the story. What I enjoyed most about it was that its one of my favourite types of story - a coming of age tale. I do prefer more modern versions of this type though, mainly because I like to relate to the character & its hard to do that when there is such a gap in the times. I think this is a book you'd gain more from if you knew about the politics and Irish culture of that time. And a knowledge of religion would have helped too, as I'll readily claim ignorance to the different Christian denominations. Overall, long-winded but good.
    • 5/5
      It's a great novel about all aspects of the Christian life...........................The part where he stops being deathly afraid of sin is actually really necessary. (“Supererogation”). Sunday was dedicated to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Monday to the Holy Ghost, Tuesday to Guardian Angels, Wednesday to saint Joseph, Thursday to the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, Friday to Suffering Jesus, and on Saturday he went to the jazz club with Thomas Merton. It doesn’t mean.... I don’t know. “Father forgive me; it’s been a day since my last confession, and I looked at Eva Cassidy the jazz singer for twenty seconds.”“Father forgive me; it’s been eight months since my last confession, and I’ve been really whoring it up the whole time.” There’s a difference. ...............................Really, by the last part, when he was “disillusioned with church and society”, or whatever, it could very well be, “A Portrait of the Scholastic as a Young Man”. If he was annoyed with the rowdy students, it was because they couldn’t follow all his quotes of Aquinas in Latin. As he was once a rowdy student himself, it’s quite the transformation. And yet he was not weighed down with a sense of sin, but carried with him a certain satisfaction. ...................................The closest any of them come to sinning, if you will, (excluding, for some reason, “I’ll be the death of that fellow one time”), in the end is questioning various doctrines, which is not a sin. It’s only a “nationalist” church which would curse that, and it’s not a nationalist book, or, more to the point, a nationalist *reality*. .... He just doesn’t sound like a cursing cynic to me. [reposted 2/3/18].
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of philosophical arguments and theological sermons framed by the titular artist's school life. All in whole, interesting and introspective in parts, but completely forgettable.
    • 1/5
      All I can say is: Thank goodness that's over!! I'm sure I really didn't understand it, but it doesn't make me even halfway interested in trying to understand it. At least I know what it's about, and I can mark it off the list!1 like
    • 4/5
      A portrait differs from an autobiography in that it is a subjective impression of the character from a certain point of view, and distorted to some degree through the use of a specific style. Whereas biography is more objective.Though the work is predominantly autobiographical in its source material, it is more a self portrait in its presentation, dressed up as a novel on the childhood and young adulthood of "Stephen Daedalus" who later takes a role in Joyce's Ulysses. Two things make this book interesting: the style in which it is written, and the subject matter. Though far more accessible and plainly-written than either Ulysses, or the even more formiddable Finnegan's wake, there are embryonic hints here of his characteristic style that would develop more fully in his later works.Joyce had an atypical childhood both from the modern viewpoint, and to a lesser degree for his time. He was initially educated in a Jesuit college in Ireland, before moving to another one due to his father's financial difficulties.This education seemed to encourage his propensity toward a religious disposition, which he showed for many of his earlier years, before a lapse into temptation and "pleasures of the flesh". Toward the end of the book he goes on to think about aesthetic theory, inspiring discussion with his peers at university. This would be a good introduction to reading Joyce, both because it gives the reader an understanding of Joyce's experiences, and because it is less challenging than his later works.
    • 1/5
      Required reading, college. I have no interest in stream of consciousness writing. It drives me mad.
    • 4/5
      high school required
    • 5/5
      This novel took me three times as long to read as it might have. A third of my time I spent reading it, a third reading about it, and another third lost in daydreaming and memories as time after time Joyce hit something from my experience so squarely on the nose that it sent me reeling.It didn't begin at all well. A title that reads like a subtitle, an opening line about a moocow, a stream-of-consciousness narrative with glimpses of scenes in fits and starts ... I feared the whole novel would be like this, until I understood it was a child's apprehension of the world. Confusion swiftly gave way to respect. James Joyce had a great talent for recapturing not only the events of childhood but also the much more difficult to remember perceptions, how a young boy takes in and processes what he learns about the world. I would never have recalled it quite this way, and yet it echoes with truth. The boy ages and the same truth shines from the page with each passing year and event, as how he perceives and what he perceives alter with time. He discovers the world is not black-and-white, that not all arguments have tidy resolutions, that the opposite sex is only human too, that religion cannot provide definitive answers, that destiny calls from within. He's still got his blind spots, though: he's stubborn about letting the world in, about taking responsibility for anyone or caring about his roots, and he's far too full of himself and his accumulated learning. But what's an artist without a surfeit of pride?I took the title to be self-referential to Joyce, but it's meant more generically; this is the development of a fictional artist's mind from childhood to self-identity as such, although with biographical elements borrowed from Joyce's own life. Surprisingly accessible (if not so much as "Dubliners"), the only sticking part for me were the big long diatribes about hell and damnation which don't really get examined but pull no punches as an example of what was being knocked into Catholic Irish boys' heads, and maybe still are in some dark corners of the world. I'm bound to deeply admire this book, one I'm stunned by for how well it got inside my head and toured me through episodes from my own life, like a tourist guide who remembers me better than I do.
    • 5/5
      Excellent wording and so well written it is scary.
    • 3/5
      dude, i don't know. it's a classic. maybe listening to it on audiobook right as the semester starts wasn't the best idea.
    • 4/5
      This work shows Joyce's talent. It is well written, easy to follow and portrays characters that the reader can easily like. Man, did Joyce ever change when ego set in.
    • 3/5
      "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”This is Joyce’s semi-autobiographical account of his formation into an artist - from childhood to adolescence. It’s the story of a young man, Stephen, who tries to grow out of the bondance and restraint of Irish nationalism, politics and Catholic faith - and into the freedom of the artistic senses which he embraces.It’s formed as a series of small episodes or “epiphanies” - with several flashbacks - it is quite hard to follow as a story - as it is more a dreamlike, state of conscience Joyce is describing. There are episodes of great beauty in this novel, great horrors of the mind, great sadness and despair and great “liberation" of the mind in the end. One can understand his need to free himself of the version of Catholic faith that is presented here - the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching of Father Arnall, the fear of death and hell, the total rejection of Stephen's bodily senses in his extreme self-mortification and asceticism. It doesn’t produce the freedom he aches for.The last part of the book is a philosophical formulation of Joyces own aesthetic theories - and I kind of lost the interest after his anguished and dramatic clash with the Catholic Church. This quote from Stephen's diary at the end of the novel kind of describes where we are - rather pompous, methinks. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the unreated conscience of my race"
    • 3/5
      I feel like I don't really get Joyce and why he's so admired.
    • 4/5
      One of the most personal books in my reading: incarcerated as I was at the time in a Jesuit prep school, and not Roman Catholic, quite the lode.
    • 3/5
      A debut novel by Irish author, James Joyce, it is considered to be a Künstlerroman (artist growth to maturity) in a modernist style and is told in third person and free indirect speech. The subject matter addresses intellectual, religio-philosophical growth of Stephen Dedalus who eventually rebels against Catholic and Irish conventions. In this novel, the author uses the techniques that he more fully uses in Ulysses and Finnigans Wake. Stephen attends a Jesuit run school where he is bullied by the other students. His father's debts interrupt his education but then he attends college on scholarship. Stephen’s name and character represents James Joyce the author and Daedalus from Greek mythology. Overall the story was okay. It was quick, I didn’t mind the style but it didn’t make me anymore eager to tackle Ulysses and Finnigans Wake. The narrator spoke with an Irish accent and did a good job with the reading of the story.
    • 4/5
      It seems to dwell a little bit on the whole church scene. And the other thing is that it's better to say only the interesting things.Also too much damn politics. All that, and that it's really too boring to criticize properly. (7/10)

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    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

    Chapter 1

    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 coming 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.

    O, the wild rose blossoms

    On the little green place.

    He sang that song. That was his song.

    O, the green wothe botheth.

    When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

    His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:

    Tralala lala,

    Tralala tralaladdy,

    Tralala lala,

    Tralala lala.

    Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.

    Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.

    The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen’s father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:

    —O, Stephen will apologize.

    Dante said:

    —O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.—

    Pull out his eyes,

    Apologize,

    Apologize,

    Pull out his eyes.

    Apologize,

    Pull out his eyes,

    Pull out his eyes,

    Apologize.

    The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

    Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink. Rody Kickham had greaves in his number and a hamper in the refectory. Nasty Roche had big hands. He called the Friday pudding dog-in-the-blanket. And one day be had asked:

    —What is your name?

    Stephen had answered: Stephen Dedalus.

    Then Nasty Roche had said:

    —What kind of a name is that?

    And when Stephen had not been able to answer Nasty Roche had asked:

    —What is your father?

    Stephen had answered:

    —A gentleman.

    Then Nasty Roche had asked:

    —Is he a magistrate?

    He crept about from point to point on the fringe of his line, making little runs now and then. But his hands were bluish with cold. He kept his hands in the side pockets of his belted grey suit. That was a belt round his pocket. And belt was also to give a fellow a belt. One day a fellow said to Cantwell:

    —I’d give you such a belt in a second.

    Cantwell had answered:

    —Go and fight your match. Give Cecil Thunder a belt. I’d like to see you. He’d give you a toe in the rump for yourself.

    That was not a nice expression. His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother! The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. And his father had given him two five-shilling pieces for pocket money. And his father had told him if he wanted anything to write home to him and, whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow. Then at the door of the castle the rector had shaken hands with his father and mother, his soutane fluttering in the breeze, and the car had driven off with his father and mother on it. They had cried to him from the car, waving their hands:

    —Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

    —Goodbye, Stephen, goodbye!

    He was caught in the whirl of a scrimmage and, fearful of the flashing eyes and muddy boots, bent down to look through the legs. The fellows were struggling and groaning and their legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawton’s yellow boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after. He ran after them a little way and then stopped. It was useless to run on. Soon they would be going home for the holidays. After supper in the study hall he would change the number pasted up inside his desk from seventy-seven to seventy-six.

    It would be better to be in the study hall than out there in the cold. The sky was pale and cold but there were lights in the castle. He wondered from which window Hamilton Rowan had thrown his hat on the ha-ha and had there been flowerbeds at that time under the windows. One day when he had been called to the castle the butler had shown him the marks of the soldiers’ slugs in the wood of the door and had given him a piece of shortbread that the community ate. It was nice and warm to see the lights in the castle. It was like something in a book. Perhaps Leicester Abbey was like that. And there were nice sentences in Doctor Cornwell’s Spelling Book. They were like poetry but they were only sentences to learn the spelling from.

    Wolsey died in Leicester Abbey

    Where the abbots buried him.

    Canker is a disease of plants,

    Cancer one of animals.

    It would be nice to lie on the hearthrug before the fire, leaning his head upon his hands, and think on those sentences. He shivered as if he had cold slimy water next his skin. That was mean of Wells to shoulder him into the square ditch because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. How cold and slimy the water had been! A fellow had once seen a big rat jump into the scum. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fender and her jewelly slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell! Dante knew a lot of things. She had taught him where the Mozambique Channel was and what was the longest river in America and what was the name of the highest mountain in the moon. Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest but both his father and uncle Charles said that Dante was a clever woman and a well-read woman. And when Dante made that noise after dinner and then put up her hand to her mouth: that was heartburn.

    A voice cried far out on the playground:

    —All in!

    Then other voices cried from the lower and third lines:

    —All in! All in!

    The players closed around, flushed and muddy, and he went among them, glad to go in. Rody Kickham held the ball by its greasy lace. A fellow asked him to give it one last: but he walked on without even answering the fellow. Simon Moonan told him not to because the prefect was looking. The fellow turned to Simon Moonan and said:

    —We all know why you speak. You are McGlade’s suck.

    Suck was a queer word. The fellow called Simon Moonan that name because Simon Moonan used to tie the prefect’s false sleeves behind his back and the prefect used to let on to be angry. But the sound was ugly. Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow Hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.

    To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.

    And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellows stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.

    It was the hour for sums. Father Arnall wrote a hard sum on the board and then said:

    —Now then, who will win? Go ahead, York! Go ahead, Lancaster!

    Stephen tried his best, but the sum was too hard and he felt confused. The little silk badge with the white rose on it that was pinned on the breast of his jacket began to flutter. He was no good at sums, but he tried his best so that York might not lose. Father Arnall’s face looked very black, but he was not in a wax: he was laughing. Then Jack Lawton cracked his fingers and Father Arnall looked at his copybook and said:

    —Right. Bravo Lancaster! The red rose wins. Come on now, York! Forge ahead!

    Jack Lawton looked over from his side. The little silk badge with the red rose on it looked very rich because he had a blue sailor top on. Stephen felt his own face red too, thinking of all the bets about who would get first place in elements, Jack Lawton or he. Some weeks Jack Lawton got the card for first and some weeks he got the card for first. His white silk badge fluttered and fluttered as he worked at the next sum and heard Father Arnall’s voice. Then all his eagerness passed away and he felt his face quite cool. He thought his face must be white because it felt so cool. He could not get out the answer for the sum but it did not matter. White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for first place and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.

    The bell rang and then the classes began to file out of the rooms and along the corridors towards the refectory. He sat looking at the two prints of butter on his plate but could not eat the damp bread. The tablecloth was damp and limp. But he drank off the hot weak tea which the clumsy scullion, girt with a white apron, poured into his cup. He wondered whether the scullion’s apron was damp too or whether all white things were cold and damp. Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tins. They said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash. Their fathers were magistrates, the fellows said.

    All the boys seemed to him very strange. They had all fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices. He longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother’s lap. But he could not: and so he longed for the play and study and prayers to be over and to be in bed.

    He drank another cup of hot tea and Fleming said:

    —What’s up? Have you a pain or what’s up with you?

    —I don’t know, Stephen said.

    —Sick in your breadbasket, Fleming said, because your face looks white. It will go away.

    —O yes, Stephen said.

    But he was not sick there. He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place. Fleming was very decent to ask him. He wanted to cry. He leaned his elbows on the table and shut and opened the flaps of his ears. Then he heard the noise of the refectory every time he opened the flaps of his ears. It made a roar like a train at night. And when he closed the flaps the roar was shut off like a train going into a tunnel. That night at Dalkey the train had roared like that and then, when it went into the tunnel, the roar stopped. He closed his eyes and the train went on, roaring and then stopping; roaring again, stopping. It was nice to hear it roar and stop and then roar out of the tunnel again and then stop.

    Then the higher line fellows began to come down along the matting in the middle of the refectory, Paddy Rath and Jimmy Magee and the Spaniard who was allowed to smoke cigars and the little Portuguese who wore the woolly cap. And then the lower line tables and the tables of the third line. And every single fellow had a different way of walking.

    He sat in a corner of the playroom pretending to watch a game of dominoes and once or twice he was able to hear for an instant the little song of the gas. The prefect was at the door with some boys and Simon Moonan was knotting his false sleeves. He was telling them something about Tullabeg.

    Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said:

    —Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed?

    Stephen answered:

    —I do.

    Wells turned to the other fellows and said:

    —O, I say, here’s a fellow says he kisses his mother every night before he goes to bed.

    The other fellows stopped their game and turned round, laughing. Stephen blushed under their eyes and said:

    —I do not.

    Wells said:

    —O, I say, here’s a fellow says he doesn’t kiss his mother before he goes to bed.

    They all laughed again. Stephen tried to laugh with them. He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? He had given two and still Wells laughed. But Wells must know the right answer for he was in third of grammar. He tried to think of Wells’s mother but he did not dare to raise his eyes to Wells’s face. He did not like Wells’s face. It was Wells who had shouldered him into the square ditch the day before because he would not swop his little snuff box for Wells’s seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty. It was a mean thing to do; all the fellows said it was. And how cold and slimy the water had been! And a fellow had once seen a big rat jump plop into the scum.

    The cold slime of the ditch covered his whole body; and, when the bell rang for study and the lines filed out of the playrooms, he felt the cold air of the corridor and staircase inside his clothes. He still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

    Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.

    There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the middle of clouds. Fleming had a box of crayons and one night during free study he had coloured the earth green and the clouds maroon. That was like the two brushes in Dante’s press, the brush with the green velvet back for Parnell and the brush with the maroon velvet back for Michael Davitt. But he had not told Fleming to colour them those colours. Fleming had done it himself.

    He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

    He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

    Stephen Dedalus

    Class of Elements

    Clongowes Wood College

    Sallins

    County Kildare

    Ireland

    Europe

    The World

    The Universe

    That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

    Stephen Dedalus is my name,

    Ireland is my nation.

    Clongowes is my dwellingplace

    And heaven my expectation.

    He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe?

    Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

    It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything. It was very big to think about everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.

    It made him very tired to think that way. It made him feel his head very big. He turned over the flyleaf and looked wearily at the green round earth in the middle of the maroon clouds. He wondered which was right, to be for the green or for the maroon, because Dante had ripped the green velvet back off the brush that was for Parnell one day with her scissors and had told him that Parnell was a bad man. He wondered if they were arguing at home about that. That was called politics. There were two sides in it: Dante was on one side and his father and Mr Casey were on the other side but his mother and uncle Charles were on no side. Every day there was something in the paper about it.

    It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away. First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then again another term and then again the vacation. It was like a train going in and out of tunnels and that was like the noise of the boys eating in the refectory when you opened and closed the flaps of the ears. Term, vacation; tunnel, out; noise, stop. How far away it was! It was better to go to bed to sleep. Only prayers in the chapel and then bed. He shivered and yawned. It would be lovely in bed after the sheets got a bit hot. First they were so cold to get into. He shivered to think how cold they were first. But then they got hot and then he could sleep. It was lovely to be tired. He yawned again. Night prayers and then bed: he shivered and wanted to yawn. It would be lovely in a few minutes. He felt a warm glow creeping up from the cold shivering sheets, warmer and warmer till he felt warm all over, ever so warm and yet he shivered a little and still wanted to yawn.

    The bell rang for night prayers and he filed out of the study hall after the others and down the staircase and along the corridors to the chapel. The corridors were darkly lit and the chapel was darkly lit. Soon all would be dark and sleeping. There was cold night air in the chapel and the marbles were the colour the sea was at night. The sea was cold day and night: but it was colder at night. It was cold and dark under the seawall beside his father’s house. But the kettle would be on the hob to make punch.

    The prefect of the chapel prayed above his head and his memory knew the responses:

    O Lord, open our lips

    And our mouths shall announce Thy praise.

    Incline unto our aid, O God!

    O Lord make haste to help us!

    There was a cold night smell in the chapel. But it was a holy smell. It was not like the smell of the old peasants who knelt at the back of the chapel at Sunday mass. That was a smell of air and rain and turf and corduroy. But they were very holy peasants. They breathed behind him On his neck and sighed as they prayed. They lived in Clane, a fellow said: there were little cottages there and he had seen a woman standing at the half-door of a cottage with a child in her arms as the cars had come past from Sallins. It would be lovely to sleep for one night in that cottage before the fire of smoking turf, in the dark lit by the fire, in the warm dark, breathing the smell of the peasants, air and rain and turf and corduroy. But O, the road there between the trees was dark! You would be lost in the dark. It made him afraid to think of how it was. He heard the voice of the prefect of the chapel saying the last prayers. He prayed it too against the dark outside under the trees.

    Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation and drive away from it all the snares of the enemy may thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace and may thy blessings be always upon us through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

    His fingers trembled as he undressed himself in the dormitory. He told his fingers to hurry up. He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers and be in bed before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died. He rolled his stockings off and put on his nightshirt quickly and knelt trembling at his bedside and repeated his prayers quickly, fearing that the gas would go down. He felt his shoulders shaking as he murmured:

    God bless my father and my mother and spare them to me!

    God bless my little brothers and sisters and spare them to me!

    God bless Dante and Uncle Charles and spare them to me!

    He blessed himself and climbed quickly into bed and, tucking the end of the nightshirt under his feet, curled himself together under the cold white sheets, shaking and trembling. But he would not go to hell when he died; and the shaking would stop. A voice bade the boys in the dormitory good night. He peered out for an instant over the coverlet and saw the yellow curtains round and before his bed that shut him off on all sides. The light was lowered quietly.

    The prefect’s shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as carriage-lamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironing-room above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there, but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their master’s face and cloak and knew that he had received his death-wound. But only the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his death-wound on the battlefield of

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