Stephen Dedalus and the Daedalus Myth

The motif of flight that is constantly repeated throughout the book stems from Stephen's last name, which he shares with a man from a Greek myth. The mythical Daedalus was also an artist of sorts, only his art was inventing and building where Stephen Dedalus's art is words. Daedalus built a king a labyrinth, which he later became imprisoned in himself. This correlates with Stephen's life because he constantly builds up his life to be better for other people, and then constantly becomes imprisoned in the life he has created. One of the most relevant examples of this is when Stephen throws himself devoutly into his religion, to the point where he physically suffers as a result. He built up his life to please God and the priests, however in the end he turned away from both. He managed to escape the prison of his own mind in that situation the way Daedalus escaped the labyrinth he built, through his art. Where Daedalus used his art of creation to build wings to fly away, Stephen realized his calling to the art of writing and words.

In one passage, the myth of Daedalus is referenced while Stephen stares up at birds flying through the sky, "A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon." In this quote, the hawk like man is Daedalus, and the way he is described is almost in an admiring way from Stephen. Stephen up to this point has still be unable to completely free himself of the constraints that his have afflicted him all his life, like Ireland, religion, and his family.

Overall, I thought "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" was an interesting book. The way it was written, through thoughts developing over years while Stephen grew up, was clever and engaging. Though some parts were difficult or boring, the book as a whole was exciting as I could never tell where Stephen would go next with his thoughts. His jumps from extreme to extreme kept me interested in what progressions he would continue to make throughout his life. The fact that Joyce wrote a book starting with a story about a moocow, and somehow make it into a serious narrative about a young boys journey into adulthood was very impressive.