It displays a similar fascination with the most mundane elements in Stephen’s life, and it asserts the same presumption of distinction in his nature. The discourse follows the gradual maturation of Stephen from his infancy, through his primary, secondary, and university education, to the eve of his departure from Ireland. Like Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man chronicles the life of an emerging artist, Stephen Dedalus (essentially the same character who appeared in the earlier work, with a slight modification in the spelling of his surname). Nonetheless, the fundamental thematic features that shaped the narrative trajectory of the earlier prose work retain pride of place in its successor. When it began to appear in serial form in 1914, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed to display far greater affinity, both formally and thematically, with Dubliners than with Stephen Hero. The narrative’s supple oscillation between detached objectivity and an empathetic awareness of Stephen’s most intimate thoughts, desires, and apprehensions shows a discursive sophistication not present in its predecessor while at the same time they mark the maturing artistic vision of an author now firmly in control of descriptive patterns only partially comprehended before. The episodic format and concern with the consciousness of its protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man announce a modernist disposition absent from the surviving fragments of Stephen Hero even as they express the concern, apparent in Joyce’s earliest writing, for the difficulty in defining an artistic identity in an unremittingly parochial world. In its final version A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stands in very distant relation to Stephen Hero, the work from which it was derived, but its link to this ur-work remains a useful measure of its achievement. Joyce composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the course of seven years, and, although it represented a significant advancement from earlier work, it undeniably grew out of a long-standing plan for a Kunstlerroman (novel about the development of an artist) whose early manifestation appears in the surviving fragments of the novel Stephen Hero, which was abandoned within a year or so after Joyce had left Dublin in favor of work on Dubliners. This is the title that Joyce gave to his first published novel, derived, as noted below, from the shorter version given to an earlier prose piece. Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Decem
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