Joyce accomplishes this linguistically, through a development of the technique of free indirect discourse. In Portrait, the remembered childhood is narrated from the perspective of the child. He has undergone some transformation or maturation and remembers childhood from afar. In earlier semi-autobiographical novels about the life of an artist, such as Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-50) or Great Expectations (1860-61), the narrator generally speaks from a safe distance. That had the queer smell.” As the novel progresses, Stephen continually meditates on sights, sounds, smells, and especially words: green, maroon, suck, queer, Dolan, Heron, foetus, sin, home, Christ, ale, master, tundish, esthetic, lyrical, epical, dramatic. On the opening page, the novel relates the child’s impressions of hearing a fairy tale and wetting the bed: “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. Thus, the narrative itself demonstrates the artist’s exploration of language. The distinctive characteristic of Joyce’s storytelling is his attempt to represent each stage of the boy’s developing consciousness in the language through which the child himself perceives the world. The early chapters of the novel chronicle Stephen’s confusions as a small boy at a strict Jesuit school in his adolescence, he visits prostitutes and wallows in sin later, he becomes deeply religious and considers entering the priesthood finally, he recognizes that his destiny is to become not a Catholic priest but a writer, “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.” Joyce signals Stephen’s premature agedness when, after hearing the catalogue of his sins, “a squalid stream of vice,” at confession, a priest asks him his age and Stephen responds: “Sixteen, father.”
Before achieving his destiny as an artist, however, the young man experiences various epiphanies, mostly misleading ones. The novel tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, a young Irishman, from earliest childhood until his decision to leave Ireland for Paris and become a writer.
Joyce treats his fictional version of his younger self with a mixture of irony and sympathy. Alfred Prufrock,” James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( 1916), though a work of youth, seems prematurely aged.
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