Symbolism in Portrait of the Artist If we were to concern ourselves strictly with plot, we might well say of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that there is no there. Not a great deal actually happens in this essentially autobiographical tale of Stephen Dedalus, and the narrative follows no clear single trajectory of cause and effect. Rather, in one of the first important uses of stream of consciousness, Joyce tells us in this short novel about Stephen's growing self-awareness as a person and as an artist, a growing self-awareness that will cause him by the end of the book to cast off the nationalism, the Catholicism and the sense of clannishness that defines other members of his father and to set off to Paris to become a writer. Joyce's use of symbolism is far more important in conveying what he has to say about these themes than what actually happens in the plot.

Because so little seems to happen in the book, we might expect that it would seem essentially static. (And indeed those reviewers who do not like it tend to point to the pointlessness of a book in which there is essentially no action.) But in fact it can also be argued that as much happens in this novel as happens in any novel, for what drives the narrative of a longer work of fiction is always conflict and the resolution of that conflict.

While we might (or might not, of course) prefer the kind of overt conflict that occurs in a work by Ernest Hemingway, to pick a good anti-Joycean counterpart, we can easily see Stephen's development into a young artist as a clearly defined conflict with a clear resolution. All throughout the book we must ask ourselves if Stephen is going to succeed in his quest to find himself. In the end, we believe that he has, as he begins...

This sense of a perilous quest (for after all, what quest can be greater than the attempt to find one's own soul) is what drives the book, giving it a sense of purpose and dynamics that might - in a purely abstract sense - seem to be missing from a book in which nearly all of the action is interior to Stephen's thoughts.
The metaphor of birds and of flight is integral to the novel - beginning with Stephen's name, for of course Daedalus is a bird-man, a creature of the earth who takes on wings and successfully uses them to buy freedom for himself. (It is interesting that we remember his story as being the fall of Icarus for hubris rather than the successful challenging of the heavens by Daedalus.)

One of the important dynamics in the novel as Weldon Thornton argues in his "The Bird Motif" is the way in which Stephen claims the imagery of flight for himself.

Another point of interested in the bird image is Stephen's attempt self-consciously to reconstitute the meaning of the image for humsefl at a crucial point in his life - the climatic scene on the beach in chapter IV. The motif also permits us to see how subtly various conscious and subconscious dimensions of the image ramify in Stephen's psyche.

While it might be tempting to view the image of the bird in Stephen's life (and in the novel) as a relatively straightforward one of liberation and of the release of the authentic self from social bounds, in fact (as Thornton argues) it is a complex and to some extent contradictory one that contains at least three different elements. These are first the threat of punishment (regardless of specific guilt on Stephen's, although given the way in which the novel is embedded…