A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Search of Its Second Half

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Search of Its Second Half

Wolfgang Iser claims that the two main poles of each literary work are artistic and aesthetic which deal with the text and the reader respectively. James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, has allocated equal attention to the reader and the text, hence it can be said that the reader is a sine qua non of this novel. Using stream of consciousness and leaving some parts unwritten, Joyce strives to activate the readerʹs role."Blank" and "negation" are the elements with which Joyce opens a room for the readerʹs "wandering viewpoint" and "image building". Joyceʹs intention of applying such a technique is both to communicate more than what is said and to manifest the significance of the reader as A Portraitʹs second half. Having encountered these apparent hiatuses, blank and negation, the readerʹs attempts are shown in filling them in for getting the latent meanings. Consequently, the corollary of the cooperation between A Portrait and its reader is the aesthetic object of this literary work. The research reveals that, due to filling in the .gaps differently, there will be different aesthetic objects for A Portraitʹs recipients