Stream of Consciousness and Epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
An omniscient narrative voice guides to the reader of A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through a continuous flow (many times without following the chronological order of the events) of thoughts, opinions, feelings or fantasies of the main character Stephen Dedalus, in a discourse that is frequently interrupted by dialogues. The speed of this flow changes during the novel, slowing down as as it progresses and Stephen gains more control over his thoughts. The first two chapters skip months and years between paragraphs but in chapter three and onwards the time length between paragraphs is shortened to hours and days.
James Joyce uses this form of narration (called “stream of consciousness”) mixing associations, memories and others digressions of Stephen about moral and ideological-politic issues, strengthening and adding complexity to the central plot of the novel.
During most of the book the voice used is the third person, except on the final section, which is composed of Stephen’s diary entries, that are narrated in the first person by him. This transition from third-person narration to the first-person mark the end of the novel, Stephen’s decides to break free of all nets that tied him and once he has his own voice he chooses the only possible way to maintain it: exile.
This is one of the modernist aesthetic elements that is present in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but not the only one.
Epiphany has also a particularly relevant presence in this novel, in fact it is considered by many authors as an essential part of the Joyce esthetic theory. Although there are many interpretations about the last meaning of this term, we can associate it, in Joyce works, with a sudden revelation, a moment when an ordinary object is perceived in a way that reveals a deeper significance.
The meaning of this term and its relevance for writing is addressed towards the end of Stephen Hero, the unfinished draft of the autobiographical novel written by James Joyce near 1904. In it Stephen Dedalus states that the function of writing is “to record epiphanies with extreme care”…. In the same passage he defines the epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (211). He believed that it was the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
Epiphany term is nowhere mentioned literally in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it is present the term claritas, identified in Stephen Hero as the moment in which “the object achieves its epiphany” (213), a essential part of the aesthetic of Stephen Dedalus who defined it saying that it is : “…the instant wherein…the clear radiance of the esthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure” (231).
An instant out of time, that produces an “stasis” situation to who has it, being this “supreme quality is felt by the artist when the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination” (230).
Stephen’s epiphany has some things in common with other similar experiences as for example a church epiphany or the moment of a scientific recognition, that is related to the act of making manifest as a kind of truth.
