A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man - Literary Style

Literary Style

Stylistically, the novel is written as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue, though towards the very end of the book dialogue-intensive scenes involving Dedalus and some of his friends, in which Dedalus posits his complex, Thomist aesthetic theory, and finally journal entries by Stephen, are introduced. Since the work describes Stephen's life from the time he was a child to his increasing independence and ultimate abandonment of Ireland as a young man, the style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, with the complexity of language gradually increasing. The book's opening pages have examples of Stephen's thoughts and conscious experience when he is a child. Throughout the work, language and prose are used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist, and the subjective effect of the events of his life. Hence the fungible length of some scenes and chapters, where Joyce's intent was to capture the subjective experience through language, rather than to present the actual experience by prose narrative. The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks; he indicated dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used by French, Spanish or Russian publications. The novel, like all of Joyce's published works, is not dedicated to anyone.