His 1916 autobiographical Künstlerroman, a decade in the making and much revised and condensed from a longer, and more conventional draft, doesn’t narrate his hero’s coming of age either in the historical third person (like Tom Jones) or the retrospective first person (like David Copperfield).

Once the initial surprise passes, though, Joyce’s gambit-more uncharitably, his gimmick-becomes clear. Hannah, “What the hell?” Later, my friend and I-he was budding painter and musician, I an aspiring writer, and we edited the school’s literature and art magazine together-agreed that this was the ideal reaction to the opening of a novel, that novelists should do their best to provoke it. looked up from the book puzzled, and one finally exclaimed to Mrs. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…. A few students read the back cover or paged through the volume or skipped to the end to see how many pages they were obligated to read but the ones who sampled the novel’s first lines. Hannah distributed Perma-Bound school copies of the Signet Classics edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

I still treasure the memory: a sunny spring afternoon in the year 2000, the last class of the school day, AP English. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Portrait joyce