Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man Analysis

Kids, teen, and adults three types of people that are drastic from each other, but what do they have in common? They all started having the same mindset of each other. James Joyce explains this in his book “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”. Through the use of diction, language, and syntax James Joyce goes through the stream of consciousness of a man growing up.

When a child speaks you expect it the choice of words to be basic or even made up but when a pre-teen speaks you would hear more complicated word choice. James Joyce uses diction to display either child’s mind or a teen’s mind. For example, when the main character in this book was a child you hear him say the word “cachou” (Joyce 1). This refers to a sneeze like a child would he would name the things he hears rather than the word itself. Another example is when James Joyce writes “his father look at him through a glass” (1). He uses the word glass instead of glasses like the ones on peoples faces, another observation of a child. Later in the

James Joyce writes, “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.”(1). This is an example of a loose sentence, which is a type of sentence which give extra information to the main point which is usually at the beginning of the sentence. These types of sentences are used by a child. This sentence also is very monosyllabic which also give a very young and childish tone. Later in the story, James Joyce writes, “Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number passed up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. Christmas vacation...” (2). This is an example of a periodic sentence, which is the opposite of a loose sentence. It gives all the extra details in the start and then finally reveals what the sentence is talking about in the end. This gives kind of a more of a polysyllabic sentence which gives an academic and adult