A Portrait of an Artist as a Young man by James Joyce-- A Stream of Conciousness novel

The Naturalist point of view holds that it is the environment that shapes an individual whereas the socialist held that it is society. However at the close of the first decade of twentieth century the view began to change drastically.

Novelists like Lawrence, Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson voiced against the naturalist tradition of Wells,   Galsworthy and Bennett. In the words of Woolf ‘the fabric of things that overlooked life, human nature and the essential soul of the human person.’ They believed that one’s subjective inner world exercises great influence on one’s action and character.

The result of such endeavour was a narrative technique called the ‘stream of consciousness’ that delves deeper into the recess of the human mind and presents the inner lives of characters in terms of continuous flow of their conscious verbalized  as well as subliminal thoughts, perceptions, mental images, feelings, sensation, etc in a non coherent pattern. It is a direct outcome of advances made in the field of psychology exposing the human unconscious; and the Bergsonian concept of time as the continuation of an infinite past in the living present.

Human consciousness is bereft of textual or verbal form but the stream of consciousness makes an attempt to create plausible textual counterpart for the involuntary surge of consciousness in their original form. So it is presented without logical organization by means of direct sentences with minimum syntax. It gives the impression of reproducing the thoughts, images, impression, and feelings just as they occur in one’s mind in a string of actions that keeps moving backward and forward, from present to past and from past to the present.

‘Portrait of an artist.....’ opening with –‘Once upon a time..........’ and ending with—‘Apologise’ makes a perfect example of stream of consciousness technique. There we find Stephen’s recollection of the story of the moocow that his father used to tell him; the song he used to sing; his experience of wetting bed and various associations of his father, mother, uncle Charles, aunt Dante, Michael Davitt, Charles Parnell and the Vances; his guilt about and fear of punishment for an unarmed crime related to his childhood friend, Eileen.

As Harry Levin puts it—‘Joyce opens Portrait... presenting an exact verbal equivalent of the opening impression of his life.’ Stephen’s interior monologue according to Hugh Kenner is presented in terms of the five senses—hearing (the story of moocow), sight (his father’s face), taste (Lemon platt), touch (warm and cold), smell (the oil sheet). In the next section of the same chapter Stephen recalls one of his days on the football ground at school feeling unfit as he feigned to play because he felt his body was weak and small amidst the crowd of players and also that his eyes were weak and watery.

Thus the entire action of the story runs into eighteen episodes that can be seen as eighteen tales dealing with the different aspects of life in Dublin taking place within the time span of a single day, presenting the totality of a human being who is moral, intellectual and sexual simultaneously.