The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist’s ‘eternal imagination’. Both an insight into Joyce’s life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to blossom fully into themselves.

I gotta admit that this book was much better than I expected it to be, because I had expected to not like this book and give it a 2 star rating at tops before I got into the book. But after reading this book I need to admit that I liked this book much more than I expected even thou I didn’t quite love it, but I still like it.

The plot in this book is very interesting and enjoyable. And I had a lot of fun with this book as I was reading it. The plot in this book talks about reflecting on life experience to and your coming of age story which I liked a fair share, because I personally like a lot the coming of age books. Which easily made me give this book some extra points for doing.

The narrative of this book is very basic, as I said the book has very promising aspect but the way it is gives us makes it feel like a generic college novel about the main character trying to find himself and what he wants to do in life which we all face at some point in our lives.

But at the same time I found this book to get very repetitive at times and some of the descriptions and moments in this book would get pretty wordy. Which made me bored of this book a few times as I was reading this book. I personally think that at least 100 pages could have been cut out of this book making this book better, which really shows how many repetitive it was and how unnecessarily long the descriptions were at times in this book.

The characters in this book were okay, we don’t get a lot of characters in this book but those characters we actually got in this book were pretty okay. I personally didn’t have a lot of strong feelings about the characters in this book because I didn’t care about them or hate them. Yes the characters could have been better in this book but they were for the most part bearable unlike characters in other books which I really hated.

The writing style was okay for the most past, but as I’ve said above it gets pretty receptive and the descriptions get way out of hands very quickly in this book. I don’t know if it typical of this author because this book is the first book I’ve read from James Joyce, but if his writing style is the same in his other books as in this one, I think I will have to pass his other books.

I Give This Book 3 / 5