The Use of Stream of Consciousness in Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Writers of the first decades of the twentieth century became fascinated by the inner lives of teeming impressions , and by the mental activities of meaning – making which constitute our private inner lives. The works of Irish writer James Joyce are distinguished by their keen psychological insight and use of various literary techniques; most notably stream of consciousness which is an attempt to write in the manner in which thoughts and memory actually work in our minds. This study is an attempt to examine the steam of consciousness as a technique used in Joyce s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) which is one of the greatest of modern novels. Joyce arranged his novel in five chapters which trace the protagonist s life, Stephen Dedalus, from boyhood to young manhood. In this study , a careful examination of this technique is carried out through moving from the innocence of childhood to frenzied episodes of adolescent lust and then to a calm contemplation of women, aesthetic theory independence and art . The study is divided into four chapters: chapter one is an introduction regarding the various meanings of the Stream of consciousness ; chapter two entitled Stephen s Childhood ; chapter three deals with Stephen s adolescence ; chapter four regards Stephen s manhood finally the conclusion of the study is offered briefly.