ABSTRACT
The great autobiographical novel of the Swiss author, Gottfried Keller, tells in the first person the story of a boy whose ambition to become an artist is the expression of his incapacity to come to terms with reality, and who in the end abjures art and devotes himself to the welfare of the community. Keller in particular criticises outright the moral behavior of his Green Heinrich, and invites us to participate in this criticism. The artistic imagination sees the individual sub specie humanitatis. Like many autobiographies, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers arose out of his need to make his reckoning with his past life. As with Sons and Lovers, independent testimony has established that Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is substantially true to historical fact. A Portrait is not a search for an actual Joyce and an actual Dublin; both are now only a medium for the emergence of an artistic gift.
