James Joyce

The fascinating part of this novel thus far has been the evolving worldview of Stephen as he starts to come out of himself towards young adulthood. When I first started reading this over winter break, it was very difficult to get inside his thinking because he was writing in the immediacy of childhood. Images like the slimy bogwater he was pushed into and the rector striking his palm just appeared in the narrative and were associated with an immediate negative connotation that stuck with Stephen throughout his life. Reviewing my life, I often seen how the negative memories sometimes are the only things that stick out from whole chunks of my life, though I am sure that those periods were not all negative. I did not notice what Joyce was doing until he started to mature and the narrator spent more time filling in the blanks as far as what was going on inside of Stephen especially his struggle with faith.

I am not even sure if this book should be labeled as a modern novel. With the way Joyce experiments with narrative structure and characterization through Stephen's senses and memories, I would venture to call Joyce a post-modernist. Many of the themes he seems to work with coincide with Jacque Derrida's ideas about the relative meaningless of language. For instance, when Stephen spends the time reflecting on the bogwater, he does not say why it matters so much other than making him feel dirty. I tried to impose all kinds of symbols like a "birth" image where he literally rises from the birth canal of the status quo to be an artist, as well as the other possible meanings of a baptism, cleansing, and death. Derrida would say all of those are true and not true because we can never know what Joyce meant and words break down when subjected to enough scrutiny. This multiplicity of readings would make me lean towards classifying this novel as post-modern through Joyce's deconstruction of the traditional narrative structure.