James Joyce Diction

Innovative authors have the skills to portray the stream of consciousness with the well-arrangement of details and language. Author, James Joyce, accomplished on conveying the stream of consciousness in the story, “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” through the natural order of childish to confusing tones with the use of diction. Likewise, Joyce’s syntactical structure moves from telegraphic, to polysyndeton and finally to loose sentences in order to express the various conscious reactions of the protagonist.

To begin with, James Joyce’s use of concrete to abstract diction portrays a childish and confusing tone based on the protagonist’s stream of consciousness. The concrete diction in the beginning of the passage such as “moocow” and

First of all, the author created a childish tone by explaining the view that the infant, Stephen Dedalus, can only see when “His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face” (1). Furthermore, the bland description of his father shows the typical amazement that a child feels when they’re observing a person. Besides the childish tone, the telegraphic sentences that were stated, “He sang that song. That was his song” demonstrated a denotative and concrete description of what was occurring to the child (1). Correspondingly, the concrete sentences shows the immaturity of the baby as the song was played by his mother. Simply, the song proceeded to “Tralala lala, Tralala tralaladdy…” and it was enough to make the child dance along. Additionally, the song contained short lyrics that showed off the basic standards that satisfies a child like “O, the green wothe botheth” (1). Such music that doesn’t show any complexity commonly matches the taste of a child. Not only was the song childish and basic, but also the unsophisticated vocabulary was visible in the telegraphic sentences. For example, “O, Stephen will apologize” presents a childish tone because it seems like as if a child is getting scolded (2). Moreover, the stream of consciousness is evident as the child reacts to each event that were happening

Therefore, the stream of consciousness is also naturally developing as the writing becomes more confusing and abstract. Focusing on the endless thoughts, Stephen began to study geography and wondered, “They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe” (2). In contrast to the beginning, the passage is transitioning to a more mature state of Stephen and, the author provided polysyndeton sentences to connect to the stream of consciousness of the protagonist. To stress on the confusing thoughts and stream of consciousness, the polysyndeton sentences also led to rhetorical questions that developed to a complicated position that Dedalus was in. As he continues to wonder, interrogative sentences began to appear such as, “What was after the universe?” and having an alone conversation, “But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?” (3). As a result, the absurd questions demonstrate how the story is becoming more confusing and vexed. In this case, the numerous of curiosity and overthinking is showing the stream of consciousness that the author wanted to portray from the start but, in a contrasting extent. Likewise, another polysyndeton, “First came the vacation and then the next term and then vacation again and then