Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Lesson Plan

How do we see Stephen's attitude toward romance and sex shift from the beginning of Chapter 2 to the end?

Begin this discussion by asking students to reread the portion of Chapter 2 where Stephen is enraptured by The Count of Monte Cristo. At the start of the chapter, he is late in his childhood and has only vaguely defined notions of matters of the heart: he imagines himself as Mercedes's lover in purely abstract terms, and his attempt to write a love poem falls short, as he has no real conception of what these feelings really mean.

By the end of Chapter 2, Stephen is a teenager, and we watch him have a much more visceral sexual experience with the prostitute. His...