A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: chapter four & five

Due by class time on Monday, November 15. (I want to use the responses in class so it's important that you post before class.)

In the comment box below you will post a response (or responses) in which you use close reading to discuss the significance of passages from chapters four and five.

To generate ideas about significance you might think about these questions in relation to the final two chapters:

How does Stephen struggle to figure out who he is in relation to his environment? What are the different aspects of who he is and of his environment that are part of this struggle? Think about family, religion, nationality. How is each significant?

How does the way the story is written -- third person stream of consciousness narration, epiphanies, allusions, images, motifs, style, syntax, diction -- contribute to how the reader experiences and understands Stephen's process of identity formation?

How is the struggle related to becoming an artist, particularly a language artist? How is the struggle? How is the struggle related to the Daedalus-Icarus myth?

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man online.
Click here to find chapter one with some good notes.
& here you'll find chapter two.
The home page for the enotes version of the book is here. You can use it to click on any of the five chapters or on "Reading Pointers for Sharper Insight" which mentions a lot of the elements -- epiphany, stream of consciousness, Daedalus & Icarus -- that I mentioned last week.