‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’

Thus, first and last, Joyce was concerned with the nature and place of ‘the artist’. His artist is not a symbol of an Everyman representative of his fellows, but of man apart, defined by his differences from the generality of mankind, at odds with his society. The talents of Joyce’s artist are developed and exercised only, as he thinks, in opposition to external pressures like the malice in the voice which describes Shem above. The precise nature of these pressures, in reaction to which the artist makes himself, found categorical expression towards the end of A Portrait of the Artist, when Stephen Dedalus is discovering his identity as an artist.