Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce's early life and career

Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He was considered a genius. Firstly he wanted to become a doctor, but then he changed his mind because he wanted to become a writer. He was a cosmopolitan man, in fact he was in Pola and then in Trieste with Nora; here he published “Chamber music” and then “Dubliners”. At the outbreak of the First World War, they will go in Switzerland where he wrote his semi-autobiographical first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, but his masterpiece is Ulysses, which after banned in Britain, was published in Paris in 1922. In the same year, Joyce started to write “Finnegans Wake”, which described the work of our mind when we sleep, instead of Ulysses that described the work of our mind on the day. He died in Zurich in 1941.

Joyce's literary techniques

Joyce generally uses the Interior Monologue, both direct and indirect. Thanks to this technique, the narrator disappears and the readers find themselves directly inside the characters’ mind. In this work, Joyce tell us a kind of manifesto about the role of the Modernist writer: the narrator doesn’t take the point of views of other characters, but he is like God, we don’t see him because he is in the narration, so he is everywhere present in every single moment of the story.