The story is initially quite vivid, laced with the smells and slang of life at a boys' boarding school. Things gradually become more sterile (typified by the two miniature essays mentioned above), and it becomes that much harder to gain a sense of the Stephen's motivations. He has one evocatively described epiphany on a windy sea-shore that tells him that his role in life is to become an artist (this is after the first essay), but is subsequently rather a cipher. He holds forth on the nature of beauty, thinks typically disparaging, but occasionally admiring, thoughts about his peers at university, and obsesses over a woman he thinks he loves (and whom he has known since childhood).
The crux of the book really seems to be the crisis that comes upon Stephen while still at school. Perhaps because he can't connect with his great love, or perhaps because he is just a horny teenager, he starts visiting brothels. He is committing the sin of fornication at the very least, and when the school has a religious retreat over a week (prompting the first essay, a sermon on the horrors of hell), his guilt really catches up with him. This is the novel's most powerful section.
As a document of the period, I found it quite an eye-opener. The control which the Catholic Church had over Ireland's population is something I knew about abstractly, but the early sections of the book made this ``fact'' really come alive. However, the story after the religous retreat at the school is relatively dull, both because nothing much happens, and also because we seem to have a so much more incoherent picture of Stephen's inner thoughts. I wondered if Joyce meant us to compare the sterility of the religious dogma that Stephen consumed at school, to what seemed to me to be the equally sterile stuff Stephen spouted at university.
The autobiographical nature of the novel is apparent in the way that there are far too many characters. Joyce may well have had vivid pictures in his head of real people behind Cranly, Davin, Dixon, Temple and Lynch, but there's barely enough material to distinguish them all in the novel. Another weakness, I felt, was the odd ending, with Stephen resolved to leave the country. Truth is stranger than fiction of course, and this is what Joyce did too, but it seems a motive-less act in the book.
To finish positively, I think the novel's great strength is the way in which it does seem true to life. The students' conversations, life at school, the physical surrounds in Dublin; everything seems quite real.
I've just discovered this website about Joyce and his works; I'll be able to check up on Portrait of the artist, and see what I should have thought.
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