"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916) is based on a literal transcript of the first twenty years of Joyce's life.

In it Joyce puts emphasis on the emotional and intellectual adventures of its protagonist.

His provisional title was "Stephen Hero" like the name of the protagonist.

Names and words, copybooks phrases and schoolboy slang, echoes and jingles, speeches and sermons float through his mind and enrich the restricted realism of the context. His own name is wedge by which symbolism enters the book.

"A Portrait" portrays Stephen's Dublin chilhood and youth and in doing so, provides an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce.

At its centre are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture and race.

Exuberantly inventive in its style, the novel sublty and beautiful orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero's quest to create his own character, his own language, life and art.

"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is the result of an extended process of revision and refinement.

This novel is a volume of three hundred pages, symmetrically constructed arround three undramatic climaxes, intimates crises of Stephen's youth.

The first hundred pages, in two chapters, trace the awakening of religious doubts and sexual

instincts, leading up to Stephen's carnal sin at the age of sixteen.

The central portion, in two more chapters, continues the cycle of sin and repentance to the moment of Stephen's private apocalypse.

The fifth and final chapter develops the theories and projects of Stephen's student days in University College, and brings him to the verge of exile.

As the book advances, it becomes less sensitive to outside impressions, and more intent upon speculations of its own. Friends figure mainly as interlocutors to draw Stephen out upon various themes. Each epiphany-awakening of the body, literary vocation, farewell to Ireland leaves him loneliner than the last.

In Stephen's mind a symbolic association between art and sex is established, and that precocious revelation helps him to decide his later conflict between art and religion.