Dedalus: Don’t Fly too Close to the Sun Anonymous 12th Grade

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a bildungsroman, James Joyce emphasizes religious and intellectual awakening through the main character Stephen Dedalus. Through his hectic and unsatisfactory childhood, Stephen learns from his mistakes and develops into an adult with aspirations. James Joyce depicts the maturation of Stephen Dedalus by utilizing greek mythological allusions of Daedalus and bird imagery.

Through the use of a mythological allusion to Daedalus, Joyce displays Stephen’s personal growth away from his fatal flaws and towards his goal of becoming an artist. Stephen is forced to repeat his name by the dean of studies. The repetition of his name brings him to ponder on its connection to Daedalus, the greatest mythological inventor. He notices parallels between his life and the story, this provides him with hope for a brighter future. He thinks, “Now at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves…was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea” (Joyce 183). Joyce utilizes a mythological allusion to the story of Daedalus and Icarus and their escape...