Image made with Kaiber

If you need to read up on the movement this work belongs to you can click the following link: Modernism

Book beginning: page 3

Religion

• Eventually, Stephen realises what it is to serve God, when younger he only sees their everyday duties and authority, he does not understand the sacrifice (p35).
• The same thing can be good or bad depending on your situation: “Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path” (p87/8).
• Stephen thinks he could still escape from the shame he is feeling before confessing, but that is the point, it is impossible (p109). A sinner carries their burden around with them, and knowing it lies within them, they feel people can see it too. It is a psychological system.
• Stephen says “it was easy to be good” (p109), but in this life nothing is easy, confession would not exist otherwise.
• Did Stephen not get along with religion because he dared not question it (p115), like he could with philosophical questions forming his own opinions?
• Stephen was surprised to find that he was “so easily at the mercy of childish and unworthy imperfections” (p116), however, this came from the stress he was exerting on his body and mind, many times suffering for the sake of it. Understandably, it was part of his repentance but the body can only take so much before it becomes frustrated.
• There is a difference between what you should ideally do and what is actually done. Each person will have their own faults and habits, especially ones formed over the years (p119).

How religion affected Stephen

• When Stephen is younger he does not understand why his uncle Charles is praying so hard as his life experience is not quite there yet, however, Stephen later prays just as devoutly (p46).
• Stephen inwardly suffers an utter fall from grace through the money he received from writing (p81). Is it better to be poor if you have a belief in Heaven and Hell?
• Stephen did not want to confess where people knew him from because of the severity of his sins, he did not want to have to feel the consequences of them in this life either (p97).
• Stephen was in a position to make the necessary changes to repent, whereas the women whose company he sought were not (p114).
• “It gave [Stephen] an intense sense of power to know that he could, by a single act of consent, […] undo all that he had done” (p117), showing how we all have power over our destinies.
• Are Stephen’s continual references to ‘darkness’ made to mirror his Christian beliefs? (p179).
• How much do Stephen’s religious studies affect his theories?

Staying true to yourself

• At the beginning of chapter II, Stephen is still imitating others, being what he thinks he should be rather than what he actually is, which later generations can then copy (p47).
• To join the order, Stephen would most likely have to become like the other priests rather than be able to be himself, if of course he wanted to achieve the standard of dedication he usually sets for himself (p121).
• Stephen occasionally gets frustrated when he projects false images from written language. But does he have to provoke the exact words into life from a poem, is it not more important to simply project the feelings triggered? (p180).
• Stephen thinks he has to like something he wrote because Emma would like it (p194), but should he not learn to stay true to himself? Love can make him unfaithful to his thoughts, is this perhaps why he did not grow close to her?

Why Stephen rejected Christianity

• Stephen did not like to be given knowledge, he preferred to work through concepts according to his own beliefs, eventually, he may even have been disappointed by what he heard (p122).
• As Stephen was such a restless soul, he most likely did not want to commit to anything for life and much less at such a young age.

Language

• There is more than one language within a language, Stephen says it is difficult to know “whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace” (p145).
• Stephen is even interested in everyday speech as a quality in friends, preferring Davin’s mode of expression to Cranly’s (p151).
• Stephen assumes that everyone speaks the same variation of a language (p194), even though he has already pointed out that languages can assign more than one definition to a word, so why not more than one word to a definition?

Politics

• Silence after the family conflict at Christmas dinner (p23), symbolises friction for political-religious issues between all people of the world.
• The boys did not arrive at a better conclusion about poetry than anybody ever did about politics (p61).

Aspects of the Epic

• All the students except Stephen backed out when it came to complaining to the rector, does that make Stephen braver than them? The fact that they were too scared of the consequences, may show that the punishment system did work? (p41).
• Stephen says “the great men in the history had names like [Dedalus] and nobody made fun of them” (p41) but that was because they had commanded respect.
• The aftermath of his adventures is not as grand as the act itself, and Stephen does not seem particularly cut out for the ups and downs which “sickened [his] heart” (p47).
• If Stephen and Heron are both virtual leaders of the school (p57), then their different approaches towards the matter are clearly seen, as Heron goes with a flank of two friends and a cane to mark their pace (p60).
• Is the description of Hell so lengthy in order to illustrate what eternity is like? (p91-95, 97-102).
• Stephen believes he is destined by prophecy due to his name. At the end of the day, life is what you believe it to be, carved out by the decisions you make and your belief in what is right and wrong (p129).

Stephen

• The idea that Stephen mentions of P. Shelley’s that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconsistent wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (p230), reminisces the rector’s claim that “there is an art in lighting a fire. […] Not too much coal […] is one of the secrets” (p142).

Stephen’s narcissism

• Stephen did not judge any one else in the church who was there to confess, so why did he think everyone would notice how long he was going to take? His self absorption blinds him from everyone else’s, as they pray to God to absolve their own sins (p109).

Family ties

• Stephen was now piecing together the details of his broken home life (p49), however, the reader never hears the particulars. Did Stephen not take the trouble to find them out or is the reader to assume it is yet another case like so many that have come before?
• Stephen is still his father’s son, when he says that “they” sold Parnell to the enemy “and you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first” (p157). This draws full circle from political and religious disputes present in the first chapter, being repeated between Stephen and Davin in the last.
• Was Stephen’s father initially proud of him? He was a very good student (p38), nice and sensible and a leader in his school (p57).

Student life

• Some dynamics apply to all worlds (p32). In reality, school teaches children things outside of the classroom that will later help them to survive in the real world. They may not be world issues, but they have to work through their own scandals.
• The teacher and the rector both believed Stephen’s story about how he broke his glasses (p42/3) but the prefect of studies said he did not (p37). Did the prefect represent the world’s blindness of a corrupt system, through unfair punishment?

External references

• This novel reads as though it were the source for the pre-Revolution life in George Orwell’s 1984: it contains all the things you should not do such as write journals, think, philosophise, and possess an ability to reject the system; students calling each other by their surnames, and referring to classmates as “fellows” (in 1984 the Party use the term “comrades”); random outbursts of singing (p66/7, 126, 162, 188); prostitution (p78); constantly recalling memories and a failure to recall them on command (p70); fading out of existence “not by death” (p70); drinking from bar to bar (p71); torture: as Cranly is trying to hit Temple he makes a reference to his elbow, which is where Winston received the first blow of his torture (p183);  and in general, the book as a reflection of Stephen’s life which mirrors what Winston wished to do with his diary.
  
  An overall Orwellian feeling is given as there are also undertones of Animal Farm when: Stephen takes on Napoleon’s style of dress for his adventures (p47); and Stephen says “we are all animals” (p159).

• Joyce references Percy Bysshe Shelley’s works a few times but there are moments which recall Frankenstein by Mary Shelley that draw attention: Stephen had not known “the pleasures of companionship with others” (p72); through sin, Stephen “had sunk to the state of a beast” and “a monster” (p85, 156); one of the times Stephen thinks of Emma and how he had “trampled upon her innocence” sounds a lot like when the Monster came across Justine (p88); and both novels make references to Paradise Lost as if they were the words of the Holy Bible (p102, 182).

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1992.