Characters in A portrait of the artist as a young man
In the novel of James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all revolves around the main character: Stephen Dedalus. Settings, events and characters of the novel only exists and take significance from Stephen’s view and they owe their importance to their capacity for reflecting something about what happens in the mind of Stephen, all that that occurs outside his head has little relevance.
The narrative parts in the novel are followed by dialogues, and the dialogues by narrative parts again. In those narrative parts, though they are written in the third person, we learn about Stephen’s thoughts and feelings that Joyce presents to us through Stephen’s stream of consciousness. In the dialogues, the focus remains fixed in the main character so that we also learn about Stephen hearing his mind.
Perhaps this intensive focus on what happens in Stephen’s mind is what makes that when someone reads this work, he or she is not really aware of the large number of characters that appear throughout their pages: family, schoolmates, priests, prostitutes … In total 451 unique characters, additionally to Stephen, appear in Joyce’s novel, but none of them is allowed to observe the world, and much less for transmit their opinions, only the young Dedalus is relevant.
In order to get closer to these characters with whom Stephen Dedalus interacts and by which the author shows us his thinking, growing and evolution as a person and as an artist, incorporate in this post arethe graphs that reflect the intensity of the interrelationships of Stephen Dedalus with the other characters using the social network analysis by chapters made by the the project Nation, Genre, Gender.
