A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.” ?from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young ManA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical and an early example of his modernist techniques, is one the most major examples of the Künstlerroman, containing a mixture of sympathy and irony.James Joyce describes in this novel young Stephen Dedalus’ intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening as he starts his quest and to question and rise against the Irish-Catholic conventions with which he has been brought up.A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, containing a number of references to the politics religion of the early 20th century Ireland, is among the best examples of the use of stream of consciousness and has been ranked by the Modern Library as the third greatest English-language novel of the 20th century.