LITERATURE: Joyce’s Portrait – Character

Boy, you think you know someone…

My image of Stephen up to this point was of a rather scared yet very alert and sensitive young lad (unknowing of the age, and keeping in mind the era), who was somehow feeling very much alone in whatever world–home or school–he resided.  Maybe it is because I am reading three books at once and not able to really focus in on things lately to become totally enmeshed in his life, I was rather surprised by the following excerpt (with a writerly note here, that I found it a wonderful bit of style to bring us into Stephen’s mind [by the narrator’s guidance] as he is with his father who is telling Stephen stories of his own youth–how the mind wanders when bored!):

He heard the sob pass loudly down his father’s throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse.  The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light.  His very brain was sick and powerless.  He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops.  By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality.  Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him.  He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of the summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father’s voice.  He could scarcely recognise as his his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:  –I am Stephen Dedalus.  (p. 92)

Well Stephen, neither could I.  Although I must admit that I can well relate to the feeling.  I just accepted him without looking deeper into the subtlety that James Joyce has given his reader.  Perhaps I am oblivious to cries of pain.  "He looked normal" is often heard at the crime scene when neighbors are discussing the suspect.  What did I miss about Stephen?  I do wonder if the growing of character in this story was not read into as seriously as I might have given the matter.

But then again, people constantly surprise us.