James Joyce uses darkness as a symbol of maturity and happiness in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When a person is mature, he or she is able to make the right decision. When a person is happy, he or she is able to show it through his or her actions and speech. Throughout the novel, Stephen proves the relationship between darkness and maturity and happiness. James Joyce uses many different literary techniques: imagery, diction, time reference, repetition, setting, and contradiction.
Father Dolan punishes Stephen for not writing his theme during his Latin lesson. The reason Stephen does not write his theme is that he has broken his eyeglasses and so, he is not able to read and write with accuracy. He is exempted from doing the work with the permission of Father Arnall, his Latin teacher. However, he is still punished. As a result of such unfairness, he decides to go to the rector of the school to report to him about it.
In order to get to the rector’s room, he must wait until “the dinner was over” (60) and “walk fast up the staircase and [through] the low dark narrow corridor that led through the castle” (60). Dinner is when people eat at night; the time period resembles darkness because it is dark at night. The narrow corridor resembles darkness because it is dimly lit. The repeated usage of the words related to darkness creates fear in Stephen. Stephen uses triple the times to walk through the corridor than it supposed to be because he is afraid. The setting during which these events are taking place shows the relationship between darkness and these events.
Before entering the corridor, he thinks about all the positive and negative outcomes that would occur as a result of his meeting with the rector. He thinks that “the rector [might] side with the perfect of studies and think [that] it was a schoolboy trick [and that as a result] the prefect of studies would come in every day [to punish him because] he would be dreadfully waxy at any fellow going up to the rector about him” (61). The word waxy is used to describe the physically mature prefect of studies. Normally, adults do not get waxy over things as often as children do. However, the unjust perfect of studies is shown to be like a child. Stephen thinks that since “the fellows [who encourage] him to go would not go themselves, they [might have] forgotten all about it. [If this is true, it would be] best to hide out of the way because [he was] small and young [so he might be able to] escape” (61) the perfect of studies. The people who encourage him to go but do not go to the rector because they are afraid and they are only children. Stephen thinks that he might be able to escape the perfect of studies if he pretends that nothing has happened. However, by being able to think so much all at once and to able to make a right decision in the end, Stephen shows that he is mature.His decision in meeting with the rector has a positive result; the rector promises that he “will speak to Father Dolan [and that he would] excuse [Stephen] from his lessons for a few days” (61). This makes Stephen feeling happy and so he “walks faster and faster excitedly” (62). It takes three pages of reading in order for Stephen to get to the rector’s room. However, it only takes up a third of a page of reading for Stephen to come out from the rector’s room. This is significant because it shows how dreary and slow it is for Stephen to go into the rector’s room and how quick, simple, and joyful it is for him to come back out.
At Cork, Stephen “pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo [in the] evenings” (67) whenever he has free time. Just like any adult or a curious youth in the process of growing up, he relaxes himself by reading things he like, but not necessarily helpful. He thinks about “the figure of the dark avenger for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible” (67). Sometimes, Stephen would “build up on the parlour table an image of the wonderful island cave out of transfers and paper flowers and coloured tissue paper and strips of the silver and golden paper in which chocolate is wrapped” (67). As a child, Stephen often thinks of something strange and terrible as being a dark figure. A cave should be dark and has earthly colors. If Stephen is still immature in his thinking, he would build a cave with something else other than colorful papers he saved because he would have thought that the cave is terrible. Such contradiction between his belief as a child and his belief during the night shows that Stephen has undergone maturity. After “breaking up the scenery” (67), he would come to think about “the bright picture of Marseilles, of sunny trellises and of Mercedes” (67). The cave is symbolic of his growth. After breaking it up, it would have nothing more to think about except for Mercedes.
Frequently, when we encounter the word, darkness, we associate it with something negative. Loneliness and fear are often connected to the word, darkness. However, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the association is positive. James Joyce creates a new meaning to the word; darkness is a resemblance to maturity and happiness.
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The James Joyce reading was difficult to understand. Although I did not really understand the whole reading, I manage to write a paper based on a part that I ananlyze with extreme care. Since I did not understand the reading completely, I chose the part I know, analyzed it, and write about it. A paper presented this way is like a "half and half." I have the knowledge for the part I wrote about, but could not relate it to the whole reading.
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