Chapter 1
The Christmas dinner dispute introduces the political landscape of late nineteenth-century Ireland into the novel. This is the first Christmas meal at which Stephen is allowed to sit at the grown-up table, a milestone in his path toward adulthood. The dispute that unfolds among Dante, Mr. Dedalus, and Mr. Casey makes Stephen quickly realize, however, that adulthood is fraught with conflicts, doubts, and anger. This discussion engenders no harmonious Christmas feeling of family togetherness. Rather, the growing boy learns that politics is often such a charged subject that it can cause huge rifts even within a single home.
Dante's tumultuous departure from the dinner table is the first in a pattern of incidents in which characters declare independence and break away from a group for political and ideological reasons. Indeed, the political landscape of Ireland is deeply divided when the action of the novel occurs. Secularists like Mr. Dedalus and Mr. Casey feel that religion is keeping Ireland from progress and independence, while the orthodox, like Dante, feel that religion should take precedence in Irish culture. The secularists consider Parnell the savior of Ireland, but Parnell's shame at being caught in an extramarital affair tarnishes his political luster and earns him the church's condemnation. This condemnation on the part of the church mirrors Stephen's shame over expressing a desire to marry Eileen Vance, who is Protestant. On the whole, however, Stephen's reaction to his family's dispute is sheer bafflement.
These chapters also explore the frequently arbitrary nature of crime and punishment. The fact that the boys in Stephen's class at Clongowes know that they will all be punished for the transgressions of the two caught "smugging" indicates that they are accustomed to unfair retribution. Furthermore, none of the instances of wrongdoing mentioned so far in the novel have been crimes of malice: neither Stephen when he wishes to marry Eileen, nor the boys caught in homosexual activity, nor Parnell caught in a relationship with another woman, demonstrates any overt ill will toward others. None of them robs, kills, or wishes harm directly upon another, yet they are all punished more severely than they deserve. Joyce explores this idea of undeserved punishment explicitly when Stephen is painfully punished for a transgression that he has not committed. When Stephen later defends himself and denounces the punishment as unfair, he acts as a representative of all the others who are unfairly punished.
There is great symbolic importance in the scene in which Stephen's peers lift him up over their heads and acclaim him as a hero, as it suggests a heroic side of the young boy that we have not seen before. Stephen's summoning of the courage to denounce Father Dolan's injustice is a moral triumph, rather than a more conventional heroic triumph in sports or fighting. Joyce highlights the difference between these two kinds of heroism in the pictures of martyrs that Stephen passes on his way to the rector's office. His walk among the images of upright men suggests that he may be joining their ranks, and his moral victory foreshadows his later ambitions to become a spiritual guide for his country. The role of hero does not necessarily come easily to Stephen, however. His schoolmates lift him up "till he struggled to get free," suggesting that heroism is a burden associated with constraints or a lack of freedom. Significantly, Stephen's heroic role does not ensure any new feeling of social belonging: after the cheers die away, Stephen realizes that he is alone. Joyce implies that becoming a hero may not bring an end to Stephen's outsider status or to his solitude.

Chapter 2
These early sections of Chapter 2 are dominated by a sense of decline, which manifests itself in several different forms. Stephen sees the reliable constancy of boyhood give way to a new sense that people and places change, and very often get worse. Uncle Charles is a sympathetic, eccentric figure in the first section of the chapter, but by the second has become senile and can no longer go out with Stephen. Similarly, Mike Flynn had once been a great runner, but now looks laughable when he runs. Most important, the Dedalus family's financial situation falls from relative prosperity to near poverty. The moving men's dismantling of the family home mirrors the dismantling of Stephen's earlier naïve faith in the world. Indeed, witnessing this slow slide into mediocrity affects Stephen deeply and directly. He is unhappy even in the company of all his relatives at Christmastime. In part, Stephen is angry with himself, but he is also angry with his change of fortune and his own changing relationship with the world around him. Stephen still feels set apart from the world, but here we begin to see the development of his capacity for moral criticism.
While the world around him declines, Stephen's own sensitivities become more acute. In particular, we see the development of his attitude toward literature. Just as Stephen identifies with the protagonist of the children's story that his father reads to him at the beginning of the novel, he now imagines himself as the Count of Monte Cristo. These two experiences of reading show how Stephen's identification with a literary character shapes his perceptions of himself. Unlike the young boy in the children's story, Stephen's new role model, the count, is active, adventurous, heroic, and even somewhat dangerous. Like the count, who is a pursuer of vengeance and a righter of wrongs, Stephen is frustrated with the unfairness he sees in the world. In showing these relationships that Stephen forges with literary characters, Joyce implies that literature is not necessarily a solitary pursuit. Indeed, Stephen's friendship with Aubrey Mills is largely based on a shared passion for imitating Dumas's novel. Literature also helps guide Stephen's newly burgeoning sexuality, which he is able to channel into dreams of pursuing Mercédès, the heroine of The Count of Monte Cristo. Stephen finds romantic models in literature again when he uses a love verse by Lord Byron as a model for the poem he writes to E. C., the girl after whom he lusts at the birthday party. The intertwining of life and literature foreshadows the later ways in which the "Artist" and the "Young Man" of the title—one who creates art, and another who lives life—complement and reinforce each other.
Stephen's love interests develop in a complex manner. He experiences a tension between his somewhat awkward real-life erotic encounters and his idealized vision of gallantly pursuing Mercédès, the heroine of Dumas's novel. Yet Stephen's vision of ideal love is less a desire for a perfect love object than a hope of possessing a woman. The Count of Monte Cristo, on whom Stephen models his own idea of love, ultimately rebuffs Mercédès with the pithy rejection, "Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes." Stephen's fantasy, then, is not one of a love-filled romance, but one of repudiating a woman who desires him. The ambivalent nature of Stephen's desire manifests itself again when he stares, smitten, at a girl at a party, but then lets nothing come of it. Indeed, while he is staring, Stephen actually contemplates not the girl at the party but his first crush, Eileen Vance, whom he had watched years before. Unlike that of a traditional romantic hero, Stephen's desire for women is jumbled and confusing.
Stephen grows increasingly alienated from his father, largely because of Mr. Dedalus's inability to connect with reality. Stephen is bored by his father's tales of the old days as he rides with him in the train to Cork. He sees how much his father has lost touch with the world: Mr. Dedalus is unable even to talk to the hotel waiter about common acquaintances, as he and the waiter get mixed up about which acquaintance they are discussing. Mr. Dedalus's failure to keep up with the times seems pathetic, and we sense that his constant drinking throughout this nostalgic trip home is an attempt to protect himself from the pain he cannot face directly. Mr. Dedalus revisits his former medical school, perhaps to recapture his lost youth, but the visit is repulsive to Stephen, who has a vision of a student from his father's era carving the disgustingly incongruous word he sees on the table. Here again, Mr. Dedalus's blithely sweet memories of the past seem irrelevant to the family's hard times in the present, and his drunken denial of the reality around him alienates his son. When Stephen states his name for his own reassurance, saying, "I am Stephen Dedalus," we sense that he feels the need to assert his own identity because his father's identity is rapidly crumbling.
Stephen's role in the Whitsuntide play foreshadows the role of hero he later aspires to fulfill. The fact that Stephen has been chosen to play a teacher is significant, but also ironic, as the role requires that Stephen play the teacher comically rather than seriously. This parody of a teacher figure hints at the novel's underlying doubt about the validity of leading or instructing others. Stephen performs the role successfully, and is amazed at how lifelike the play feels: the "disjointed lifeless thing had suddenly assumed a life of its own. It seemed now to play itself. . . ." The life Stephen discerns in the play makes him aware of the importance of acting as a metaphor for living. Stephen's awareness of life's drama becomes problematic, however, when the things he previously thinks real begin to appear false. He reflects on the moralizing voices of his early years that "had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears." Art and life are, in a sense, switching places: while the artistic performance seems lifelike, life itself seems artificial.
Joyce's experimentation with the technique of stream of consciousness—capturing the processes and rhythms by which characters think—is especially evident in the sudden flashbacks of the play scene. Joyce narrates Heron's and Wallis's near violent teasing about Stephen's flirtation with the girl in the audience. Then suddenly, without any warning, Joyce takes us back to Stephen's first year at Belvedere, when he was accused of heresy because of a mistake he made in an essay. This memory segues into another memory from a few nights after the first, when Stephen was forced into a ridiculous schoolboy argument about the relative merits of Byron and Tennyson. When this argument is finished, the narration returns to the scene of the play in the present moment. Joyce wants us to feel unsettled and even a bit confused by these unannounced leaps from present to past. The time shifts represent the way Stephen's mind—and the human mind in general—impulsively makes constant connections between experiences from the present and memories from the past. We are never told why Stephen's mind links the girl, the literary dispute, and the heresy accusation, which leaves us with an impression of psychological complexity that we cannot fully unravel.
Chapter 3
These sections explore the relationship between worldly pleasures and sin. The scene in which Stephen cashes his prize money is the first of several episodes in the novel that focus intensely on money and the thrill money evokes. The prize money Stephen wins seems strangely connected to his religion: the sum, thirty-three pounds, echoes Christ's age when he was crucified. Stephen confuses monetary and spiritual matters when he attempts to purchase familial harmony with money and gifts. In Christian theology, the sin of trying to exchange spiritual things for worldly ones is known as simony, a word that recalls the name of Stephen's father, Simon. This implies that such confusion of the material with the spiritual—with concepts such as faith and love—may be part of Simon's legacy to his son. Indeed, Stephen does have trouble seeing the incompatibility of some of his actions with his religious beliefs, venerating Mary even as he daydreams about visiting prostitutes. However, when Stephen says that his soul withers as he hears the rector praise St. Francis Xavier, it is clear that Stephen knows the church would view his acts as sinful.
Stephen's relationship with women becomes more complex in this section. He simultaneously displays a fervent devotion to the Virgin Mary and an obsession with visiting whores. In both cases, Stephen relates to women not as individuals but as representatives of a type. Both Mary and the prostitutes are described more as myths or dreams than as any element of everyday life. Stephen portrays Mary in a highly poetic and exotic manner, using evocative words such as "spikenard," "myrrh," and "rich garments" to describe her, and associating her with the morning star, bright and musical. However, when Stephen muses that the lips with which he reads a prayer to Mary are the same lips that have lewdly kissed a whore, we see that he has mysteriously linked the images of the whore and the Virgin in his mind as opposite visions of womanliness. Indeed, Stephen describes his encounter with the prostitute in terms similar to a prayer to Mary: when he kisses her, he "bow[s] his head" and "read[s] the meaning of her movements." When Stephen closes his eyes, "surrendering himself to her," this quiet submission mimics the Christian surrender to the Holy Spirit. Moreover, both the Virgin Mary and the prostitute represent a refuge from everyday strife, doubts, and alienation. Stephen attempts to flee mentally to the pure realm of the Virgin Mary when he is repelled by the stupidity of his classmates. Similarly, Stephen flees to the prostitute after reaching the dismal realization that his financial efforts have done nothing to allay the discord in his family. Like Mary, the prostitute offers him a chance to escape the discord around him in an almost religious way, if only momentarily.
In this section, we see Joyce borrowing from classic works of literature in innovative ways. Father Arnall's vision of hell, which leads to a turning point in young Stephen's life, draws heavily from Dante Alighieri's poem Inferno, which tells the story of Dante's descent into hell. Inferno is a landmark in the genre of spiritual autobiography—the recounting of a soul's progression through righteous and sinful states. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man offers another such spiritual autobiography, as Joyce explores his own spiritual history through the character of Stephen Dedalus. Joyce places Stephen's glimpse of hell at the exact center of his novel, giving it a structure similar to that of Dante's Divine Comedy, of which Inferno is the first part. Inferno places the devil at the center of the Earth, so that the pilgrim seeking God must go downward before he ascends upward toward salvation. Similarly, Stephen's path has been a decline into sin and immorality that brings him to this fearful central view of hell. Just as Dante's despair is eased by the appearance of the Virgin Mary beckoning him upward to heavenly union with his beloved Beatrice, Stephen receives a vision of Mary placing his hand in his beloved Emma's. The visit to the inferno reveals unspeakable torments, but nonetheless offers a way out, a path toward ultimate holy love.
In this chapter, Stephen undergoes more than a mere vision or tour of hell—the agonies he suffers during the sermon seem closer to the experience of hell itself. He does not simply picture hell's flames in his mind's eye, but actually feels the flames on his body: "His flesh shrank together as if it felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames." In addition, he does not just imagine the boiling brains described by the preacher, but actually senses that "[h]is brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull." Stephen's close identification with the subject of the sermon sets him apart from his fellow students, who later chat casually about it. This dissimilar reaction reiterates the fact that Stephen is a social outsider. He experiences spiritual yearnings more immediately and intensely than others, even feeling them physically.
Stephen's experience as he contemplates the religious sermon binds his perceptions of past and future. Stephen's horror of hell is largely a horror of sufferings to come in the future, which he experiences as if they are in the present. He lives through his own future death: "He, he himself, his body to which he had yielded was dying. Into the grave with it! Nail it down into a wooden box, the corpse." Stephen's imagination carries him still farther into the future, all the way to the equally terrifying Judgment Day. However, while religion forces Stephen to face the future, it also forces him to confront the past. Father Arnall visits the school like a figure out of Stephen's memory, a ghost from years gone by. Stephen responds to the visit with a return to infancy: "His soul, as these memories came back to him, became again a child's soul." Stephen's encounter with the past is more than just memory—it is a momentary change in his very soul. Thus, Arnall's sermon prompts Stephen both back toward childhood and forward toward death, reaching out to both extremes of his life. The novel suggests that the aims of autobiography and the aims of religion are similar, as both lead individuals to integrate their present, past, and future lives in an attempt to make sense of the whole.
Stephen begins fervently to apply spiritual discipline to his own actions, in contrast to his passive status as a member of the audience listening to Father Arnall's sermon and attempting to understand it academically. Long passages during the sermon make no mention of Stephen at all, as the focus is on hell itself. Here, however, we focus on Stephen's reaction, which is no longer passive. His withdrawal into himself is not only described in psychological terms, but in physical ones as well, as when he goes to his room "to be alone with his soul." In applying the knowledge from the sermon, Stephen becomes the master of his spiritual fate. Even his dream of hell indicates a more active relationship with the torments he undergoes, as the goatlike devils come from his own mind as his own creations. Since they are products of Stephen's own mind, he can disown them if he wishes. Therefore, as scary as the goat nightmare is, it is something of a release and a relief for Stephen, who runs to the window to be soothed by the fresh air. His decision to confess his sins is the next step in his gradual process of taking control of his spiritual state.
Stephen's rigorous program of spiritual self-discipline is impressive, and demonstrates his extraordinary earnestness. The unbelievable asceticism that he willingly adopts demonstrates his strength of will and suggests his heroism. Like some of the early ascetics and hermits of the Christian Church, who lived in the desert and ate locusts, Stephen displays an astonishing ability to overcome his bodily longings and to affirm the superiority of the soul. In doing so, he proves his similarity to martyrs and saints.
However, Joyce suggests that a saint's life may not be desirable for Stephen. Joyce's style, which is richly detailed and concretely sensual in earlier sections of the novel, now becomes extremely dry, abstract, and academic. This style corresponds with Stephen's psychological state: as Stephen becomes more ascetic and self-depriving, Joyce's language loses its colorful adjectives and complex syntax. The very difficulty of reading such dry language suggests the difficulty of the life that Stephen is leading. Stephen's question at the end of Chapter 4, Section 1—"I have amended my life, have I not?"—emphasizes the fact that Joyce himself has amended his prose. Importantly, though Stephen explicitly acknowledges that his life has been changed, he does not say that it has necessarily improved. His heroic efforts to deprive himself are impressive, but do not necessarily make him a better person.

Chapter 4
Although Stephen's path through life continues to be guided by females, the kinds of women who influence him change as he grows older. The Virgin Mary has been Stephen's main object of devotion, but now she seems to have lost her power over him. When he passes by a shrine to the Virgin on his way home from school, he glances at it "coldly," no longer stirred by her presence. The school director's odd emphasis on the word "jupe," meaning "skirt," implies that some other woman may have replaced Mary in Stephen's heart. Stephen's turn away from the church and toward the world is emphasized when he turns from the Virgin to the beautiful girl he sees bathing. Importantly, this shift occurs directly after Stephen contemplates Daedalus's use of art to achieve freedom—a suggestion that Stephen will do the same. The bathing girl is a secular version of the Virgin Mary, an emblem of a means to rise to heaven, but without the church.
Joyce's novels are notable for their allusions to classic works of literature, as seemingly insignificant comments or phrases are often references to other novels, plays, or poems. One of the primary sources on which Joyce draws in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Greek myth. The mythic aspect of the novel emerges clearly in this section with the reference to Daedalus. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a renowned craftsman who built a pair of wings for himself and a pair for his son, in an attempt to escape imprisonment on the island of Crete. In this novel, Stephen's view of himself changes when his friends address him with a Greek version of his name. He suddenly begins to reflect on certain affinities between himself and that mythical "fabulous artificer," no longer defining himself through Christian doctrine by relating himself to Christ and Mary. Rather, Stephen turns to pagan sources and inspirations in his quest for self-definition. His name is significant. His first name alludes to the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen. His surname, however, alludes to a pagan character whose skill allows him to rise high above the world. In this section, Stephen begins to shift his emphasis from his first name to his last name. He dwells on the idea of Daedalus's flight-giving wings, a piece of artisan handicraft that symbolizes the individual's ability to create art and the possibility of transcending worldly woes. Much as Daedalus escaped prison, Stephen dreams of escaping the misery of his impoverished family and narrow, sad life.
To Stephen, the vision of his mythical namesake is not just a hint of his own fate, but a prophecy of it, a prediction that cannot be avoided. Stephen's mental image of "a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea" strikes him as a "prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood." Daedalus is a "symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being." This vision is not simply an image of his future, but of his childhood and boyhood as well. His vision reveals a hidden thread that connects Stephen's past, present, and future into one whole. Most important, perhaps, Stephen realizes that the art that he will forge is not merely a beautiful object, but an entire eternal existence. Through his art, Stephen creates an "imperishable being" very much like a soul—he will not just create literature, but will create himself.
Chapter 5
The dean's inability to understand Stephen's use of the word "tundish" may seem like a minor detail, but it actually symbolizes the clash of cultures that is at the heart of the Irish experience. The dean is English, and represents to Stephen all the institutional power and prestige England has wielded throughout its colonial occupation of Ireland. The dean is thus a representative of cultural domination. By failing to understand Stephen's word—which is derived from Irish rather than English—the dean reminds us of the linguistic and cultural divide between England and Ireland. With sadness and despair, Stephen reflects that this divide may be unbridgeable, and his disappointment underscores the discontent he already feels for stale university life. The episode with the dean shows Stephen the importance of creating his own language, as the English he has been using is not really his own. He realizes that English "will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay."
Joyce reinforces this idea of speaking someone else's language throughout the novel through repeated uses of quoted speech from a variety of external sources. The opening lines of the novel, for instance, are a child's story told by someone else. Later, we find Stephen frequently quoting Aquinas and Aristotle. Yet despite these constant citations, no quotation marks are used in the novel, sometimes making it difficult to tell the difference between a character borrowing someone else's words and a character speaking in his or her own voice. The "tundish" episode with the dean shows Stephen the necessity of making this distinction and the importance of creating a distinctive and truly Irish voice for himself.
Joyce also uses these sections to explore the contrast between individuality and community. On one hand, Stephen is now more of a free-floating individual than ever before. His links with his family, whose sinking poverty level and carelessness repel him, are weaker than ever. His mother is disappointed with the changes university life has brought about in her son, and his father calls him a "lazy bitch." There seems to be little parental pride or affection to offset Mr. Dedalus's hostility. Moreover, Stephen's social life is hardly any less solitary. He fails to share the ideological position of any of his friends: he cannot adopt the Irish patriotism of Davin or the international pacifism of MacCann. Even the flattering adulation of Temple fails to inspire Stephen. Therefore, having given up hope on family, church, friends, and education, Stephen seems to be more alone than ever. This assessment is only partly true, however, as Stephen is never completely isolated in the novel. His family repels him, but he continues to see them and speak to them, and his warm address to his siblings shows that he still has family ties. Furthermore, even when composing epitaphs to dead friendships, Stephen is surrounded by his friends and interacts with them in a lively and outgoing way. The proximity of such human relationships is clearly important, as Stephen retains a powerful commitment to his society until the very end of the novel, even when dreaming of fashioning a new soul for himself.
Stephen's long meditation on the birds circling overhead is an important sign of his own imminent flight. He cannot identify what species the birds are, just as he is not sure about his own nature. All he knows is that the birds are flying, as he too will fly. He will build his wings alone, just as his mythical namesake Daedalus alone crafted the wings with which he escaped from his prison. The birds offer Stephen relief from his daily worries: although their cries are harsh, the "inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches murmured insistently." The significance of the birds is, however, morally ambiguous. Stephen is not sure whether the birds are "an augury of good or evil," just as he cannot be entirely sure whether his decision to leave his family, friends, and university will have good or bad consequences. Finally, the birds are a symbol of literature and national politics as well. They remind Stephen of a passage from a recent Yeats play he has just seen, lines that refer to the swallow that wanders over the waters. As the nationalist play has attracted patriotic criticism, this swallow is a potent political symbol to which Stephen responds deeply.
Joyce's transition to journal entries at the end of the novel is a formal change that highlights Stephen's continuing search for his own voice. The journal entry form explores the problem of representing a person through words. Stephen is no longer being talked about by an external narrator, but is now speaking in his own voice. This form also frames the final section of the novel with the first, which opens with a different external voice—Mr. Dedalus telling his son a story. Throughout the novel, Stephen has continued his search for a voice, first drawing on others' voices—citing Aquinas and Aristotle as authorities and quoting Elizabethan poems—and later realizing that he must devise a language of his own because he cannot be happy speaking the language of others. This last section of the novel finally offers a glimpse of Stephen succeeding in doing precisely that. We finally see him imitating no one and quoting no one, offering his own perceptions, dreams, insights, and reflections through his words alone. Stylistically, this section is not as polished and structured as the earlier portions of the novel, but this lack of polish indicates its immediacy and sincerity in Stephen's mind.
Stephen's ideas of femininity become more complex in the final sections of Chapter 5, when he finally confronts Emma and talks to her on Grafton Street. Stephen's relation to females throughout the novel has been largely conflicted and abstract to this point. This meeting with Emma, however, is concrete, placing Stephen himself in control. The conversation with Emma emphasizes the fact that women are no longer guiding Stephen: his mother no longer pushes him, the Virgin Mary no longer shows him the way, and prostitutes no longer seduce him. Women are no longer in a superior or transcendent position in his life. Finally, in actually speaking with Emma face-to-face, Stephen shows that he has begun to conceive of women as fellow human beings rather than idealized creatures. He no longer needs to be mothered and guided, as his emotional, spiritual, and artistic development has given him the vision and confidence to show himself the way.