The Representation of Growth in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Anonymous College

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an uneasy place within the tradition of the bildungsroman. Critics contemporary to Joyce recognized the novel’s preoccupation with growth while acknowledging its dissimilarity to more conventional bildungsroman: in his famous review, H.G. Wells described its intricate structure as ‘a mosaic of jagged fragments’. This image aptly conveys the unorthodox manner in which Joyce depicts his protagonist’s growth and development. It is characterized by repetition and regress as well as progress, and the very title bespeaks a certain motionlessness. Such apparent disorder, one might argue, reflects the complexity of both Stephen’s development from child to the eponymous young artist and the universal experience of psychological and moral growth.

It is worth noting the asymmetry of motif in A Portrait, and how this pertains to the overarching focus on growth. The motifs of Stephen’s life do not occur within what Tobias Boes describes as ‘closed circles’ but develop alongside Stephen. He compares them instead to Yeats’s concept of ‘the widening gyre’, appearing in a cyclical and repetitive fashion but simultaneously growing in complexity and meaning. Growth and development, therefore, are...