A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first novel, published after the previous success of his short story collection Dubliners . The novel is written in a modernist style, with dialog and narration blending together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness meant to invoke the blurriness of memory. Joyce originally planned writing a realist autobiographical novel of 63 chapters titled Stephen Hero . He abandoned the attempt halfway through, and refocused his efforts on Portrait , a shorter, sharper work in the modernist style. His alter-ego remained Stephen Dedalus, named after Daeda