A Portrait of Living

"The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful" (Joyce 180).

Stephen Dedalus, the young man Joyce shows his reader's in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is constantly caught in the conflict between living and existing. The reader sees Stephen as a youth, basically existing to please others. This loss of individuality in his adolescence contributes to his confusion with what he wants to do in life. I did not identify Stephen as a living character until he began to experiment with his own choices. When he falls victim to his own desires and sleeps with a prostitute, we see Stephen make a choice of his own and though he feels he has sinned afterwards, he finally does something for himself and deals with the consequences as does any living person. Stephen’s acts make him think and mature into someone he wants to be. He moves away from a focus on belief in God and moves more towards aestheticism. His interest in aesthetic beauty aids him in becoming the artist he always wanted to be. Stephen’s transformation from a sheltered boy to a self-satisfied man show that he has lived and not existed. If he was just an existing character, we would not have seen any excitement in Stephen’s life and therefore this book would’ve been very boring. Existing people don’t have a story. They have nothing that has impacted so much to the point where they want to pursue any desires or their purpose in life.