A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my
home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some
mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my
defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning."
James Joyce's supremely innovative fictional autobiography is also, in the apt
phrase of the biographer Richard Ellmann, nothing less than "the gestation of
a soul." For as he describes the shabby, cloying, and sometimes terrifying
Dublin upbringing of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, Joyce immerses the reader
in his emerging consciousness, employing language that ranges from baby talk
to hellfire sermon to a triumphant artist's manifesto. The result is a novel
of immense boldness, eloquence, and energy, a work that inaugurated a literary
revolution and has become a model for the portrayal of the self in our time.