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3.43 AVERAGE
3.43 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
While I liked the stream of consciousness prose and the scene's that described Hell, the rest of the book was a little... Bland. His dreams were also really interesting but overall I just didn't really appreciate what else was going in. Well written but not the most exciting book in the world
So, this book is written in "stream of consciousness" style because the whole time you're reading it, you're inside the character's head drowning in the sea of his questions, his ways in answering them, his late-nights cravings and fantasies (oh don't get me started on those fantasies), his fears, his epiphany-- all those thinky stuff we do with our head.
But what I found interesting about it is the fact that it's written in third person so another person (or thing, whatever entity you choose) is telling you the character's thoughts.
And for some reason, it worked.
I liked the book.
It was hard to follow because I had stared at pages wondering what in the universe the author meant a lot of times.
I put it off countless times as well because I felt that the story (whatever it is) is a bit slow and dragging.
And I still have no idea how I finished it. But I did.
And I liked it.
Mostly due to his realization of beauty according to his own will-- of finding out what he really wants after all-- of not following what he believes is not his belief.
Mostly due to his metamorphosis.
But what I found interesting about it is the fact that it's written in third person so another person (or thing, whatever entity you choose) is telling you the character's thoughts.
And for some reason, it worked.
I liked the book.
It was hard to follow because I had stared at pages wondering what in the universe the author meant a lot of times.
I put it off countless times as well because I felt that the story (whatever it is) is a bit slow and dragging.
And I still have no idea how I finished it. But I did.
And I liked it.
Mostly due to his realization of beauty according to his own will-- of finding out what he really wants after all-- of not following what he believes is not his belief.
Mostly due to his metamorphosis.
It was definitely interesting, but I got more of a kick out of reading the plot summary on Wiki than I did reading the actual book...
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2729392.html
Ireland has changed a lot since Joyce was a lad - indeed, it's changed a lot since I was a lad. I found myself re-reading this on a recent trip which included 24 hours in Dublin, where due to having a bad back I limited myself to the space between Pearse Street and St Stephen's Green, cutting several times through Trinity which Stephen Daedalus sees as "set heavily in the city's ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring", and mused on how on the one hand Trinity is now much better integrated with its city surroundings than it was back in Joyce's day, and how on the other Dublin has raised its intellectual and cultural game even in my lifetime, as modernity hit Ireland with a thump. I guess the turning point was somewhere in the late 1980s, with the failure of the first divorce referendum and the success of the Eighth Amendment proving in fact to be the last gasp of the old order, defeated electorally in 1990 by Mary Robinson and morally in 1992 by Bishop Casey (who of course turned out merely to be the tip of the iceberg of ecclesiastical scandal and disgrace); last year's equal marriage referendum demonstrated how far Ireland has now come.
I was brought up in Catholic Belfast, my education still tinged with a lot of the dogmatic approach that Joyce experienced (though my school was run by nuns, which I think already made a difference), so A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I first read it as a teenager was a hostile mapping of a close but unfamiliar corner of my own world. (Except that there were no prostitutes in my world, as far as I knew.) Many in the post-Vatican II church attempted to get away from the rhetoric of hellfire and mortal sin, but it was always there under the surface, tied in with the practices around confession and indulgences, and buttressing social conservatism generally. The weakest bit of Portrait for me is the lengthy sermon on hell in Chapter 3, but I suppose the point is well made.
What I missed on first reading, and see now, is that Joyce is also writing about the cultural constraints of the Ireland he grew up in - largely self-imposed, rather than engineered by British rule. It's not only the constraints of dogmatic religion; it's the difficulty in thinking outside the box. Joyce seems to me to have a deep distrust of narrow Irish nationalism - the most unpleasant character in Ulysses by far is the Citizen,based on Gaelic League founder Michael Cusack; the dinner time debate about Parnell turns surprisingly nasty. A lot of his contemporaries saw the revival of Irish cultural identity as an emancipatory moment; Joyce seems to see it as a blind alley, when there is a wider more interesting world out there, which is what he eventually chooses.
And of course the writing style of the book is very engaging (apart from having too much hellfire, and not really enough about girls, though again I suppose that's part of the point). We may sometimes wonder just where the boundary between Joyce and Daedalus is, but we have a good idea of where Daedalus is coming from and why, and eventually of where he wants to go. It's also mercifully short; I don't think I will ever try the original 913-page manuscript of Stephen Hero...
Ireland has changed a lot since Joyce was a lad - indeed, it's changed a lot since I was a lad. I found myself re-reading this on a recent trip which included 24 hours in Dublin, where due to having a bad back I limited myself to the space between Pearse Street and St Stephen's Green, cutting several times through Trinity which Stephen Daedalus sees as "set heavily in the city's ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring", and mused on how on the one hand Trinity is now much better integrated with its city surroundings than it was back in Joyce's day, and how on the other Dublin has raised its intellectual and cultural game even in my lifetime, as modernity hit Ireland with a thump. I guess the turning point was somewhere in the late 1980s, with the failure of the first divorce referendum and the success of the Eighth Amendment proving in fact to be the last gasp of the old order, defeated electorally in 1990 by Mary Robinson and morally in 1992 by Bishop Casey (who of course turned out merely to be the tip of the iceberg of ecclesiastical scandal and disgrace); last year's equal marriage referendum demonstrated how far Ireland has now come.
I was brought up in Catholic Belfast, my education still tinged with a lot of the dogmatic approach that Joyce experienced (though my school was run by nuns, which I think already made a difference), so A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I first read it as a teenager was a hostile mapping of a close but unfamiliar corner of my own world. (Except that there were no prostitutes in my world, as far as I knew.) Many in the post-Vatican II church attempted to get away from the rhetoric of hellfire and mortal sin, but it was always there under the surface, tied in with the practices around confession and indulgences, and buttressing social conservatism generally. The weakest bit of Portrait for me is the lengthy sermon on hell in Chapter 3, but I suppose the point is well made.
What I missed on first reading, and see now, is that Joyce is also writing about the cultural constraints of the Ireland he grew up in - largely self-imposed, rather than engineered by British rule. It's not only the constraints of dogmatic religion; it's the difficulty in thinking outside the box. Joyce seems to me to have a deep distrust of narrow Irish nationalism - the most unpleasant character in Ulysses by far is the Citizen,based on Gaelic League founder Michael Cusack; the dinner time debate about Parnell turns surprisingly nasty. A lot of his contemporaries saw the revival of Irish cultural identity as an emancipatory moment; Joyce seems to see it as a blind alley, when there is a wider more interesting world out there, which is what he eventually chooses.
And of course the writing style of the book is very engaging (apart from having too much hellfire, and not really enough about girls, though again I suppose that's part of the point). We may sometimes wonder just where the boundary between Joyce and Daedalus is, but we have a good idea of where Daedalus is coming from and why, and eventually of where he wants to go. It's also mercifully short; I don't think I will ever try the original 913-page manuscript of Stephen Hero...
“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is, is another question.”
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes