The journey of a mind strained with religion, family, and culture to the portrait of a mind that has achieved emotional, intellectual, and artistic adulthood . . . Under a father's powerful influence, bullied by peers at school, Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter-ego of Joyce, must grapple through the pleasures and pains of adolescence to experience the psychological, sexual, and spiritual discoveries. Setting his mind on a self-imposed exile eventually, he lives a life devoted to the art of writing, casting off all his social, familial, and religious constraints. Rushing you back and forth through sudden disruptions, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's autobiographical novel, traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of Stephen.
