Stephen's Journal

In the very last section of Portrait, we see the completion of a book-long reversal from a narrative style where we see a rough sketch of how Stephen experiences his moments in the external world, to one in which he must explicitly communicate to us his internal views on what happens around him, with the reader left guessing as to what the events he describes actually would have looked like. The change to a journalistic style seems abrupt at first, because it is the first explicit "technical" shift, but really follows a progression in which Stephen becomes more and more vocal. The book starts with Stephen as an almost totally passive character; most of his time is spent watching the conversations of others, and his few moments of reflection and creativity come in moments of solitude, starting when he composes his first ever "poem" while hiding under the table. Even most of the narration, while clearly colored by Stephen's childish consciousness, is merely descriptive of outside perceptions. Every chapter thereafter sees Stephen become slowly more assertive, with his abstract thoughts bleeding more and more over into his descriptive ones. By the beach scene in Chapter 4 we see long stretches of  imagination on Stephen's part, uninterrupted by the play of his classmates, and which may even include some degree of hallucination. The mental assertiveness Stephen develops over the course of the book peaks in Chapter 5, which consists mostly of quotes of his monologues. For the first time we are given a step-by-step description of Stephen's ideas, and we can't help but see them played out in his now less-detailed descriptions of the physical world.

The shift over to a first-person journalistic style, while allowing us to see even better than before Stephen's opinions, leaves us with an overly-internal understanding of his relationship with the world, and one which is dependent on his mediation; we are no longer seeing Stephen as he is, but rather as he wants to appear. Like his friend Lynch, all we can do is accept everything Stephen says with a nod. By describing his conversation with Cranly in a blatantly deluded light, Stephen makes himself an unreliable narrator in the very first journal entry we see of his. That feeling doesn't go away by the end of the book; I was left feeling mildly disoriented, as Stephen's writing is so recursive and personal that it becomes hard to tell why he chooses to do or write the things he does (not that there's much difference). In particular I found it hard to understand why Stephen felt so strongly that he had to leave Ireland -- I had my clues, but his description of the matter didn't exactly make him seem like an exile, more like someone who had made a relatively banal decision. Leaving his home country seemed for him about on par with moving across the street.

Given the gradual narrative shift over the course of the novel, I have to ask: what is Joyce trying to do in bringing things to such a forceful head in the last section? Stephen's consciousness has already all but taken over the narrative, so why do we need to have that become explicit? Learning about Joyce's actual life was helpful with these questions, although not really for the facts themselves; just having a better sense of Joyce as a real, physical person who once existed made it easier to imagine Stephen stepping out of the book and becoming him. Maybe the point of turning the last few pages of Portrait into pure Stephen-talk is less to complete some kind of cycle (although that's nice too), and more to get us to think of Stephen as the person writing his own story -- a way to unify the fictional Stephen Dedalus with the real author James Joyce. By giving us a few pages out of Stephen's early journal, we are essentially seeing the beginning of the writing of the novel itself. Those few pages are Stephen's first attempts to make the book he's in.