Imagery Pattern of Clouds in the Portrait of an Artist by James Joyce

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The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is widely recognized by New Critics as one of the greatest novels of its age for its aesthetic artistry. In the Portrait, a powerful autobiographical novel of bildungsroman, commonly known as a coming-of-age story, that follows the life of Irish protagonist Stephen Dedalus, Joyce portraits his momentous transition to adulthood as a passage of psychological struggle towards his ultimate philosophical awakening and his spiritual rebirth as an artist. Most visibly in Chapter Four of the novel, Stephen Dedalus, after the denial of his own priesthood, goes on to seek his artistic personality through his secluded journey amongst a myriad of natural elements. Dramatizing the Stephen’s progression towards his artistic revelation, Joyce deployed numerous image patterns that together insinuate the spiritual transformation of Stephen Dedalus into an “impalpable imperishable being” out of the earthly body of which he is composed of (Joyce 108). Specifically, Stephen’s intellectual transfiguration is largely connected with the symbolic connotations of the clouds depicted throughout his journey, which alludes to his transcending soul, wafting across the celestial heaven yet hovering intimately close to the earth that he belongs.
Clouds in the Portrait are the great artificers with unconstrained imagination, which Stephen Dedalus simultaneously finds within his soul during his journey of self-realization. Upon encountering the Christian brothers across the narrow bridge, Stephen feels a secret sense of personal shame and commiseration of his own spiritual inferiority. He tries to gaze down towards the secular earth in embarrassment and only finds the Christian brothers and the sky in refl...

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...near the earthly warmth and materialistic passions and to coagulate and fall if near the heavenly chill and spiritual abstinence. By repeatedly manipulating this image pattern of the clouds as the medium between heaven and earth, Joyce tirelessly illustrate the nature of artistry as the compromise between the abstemious religion and the materialistic agnosticism.
Perhaps it is exactly as James Joyce suggests so, one has to transcend from the civilization within “the vesture of the hazewrapped city” in order to reach for the greatness above the earth that makes the artistry truly impalpable and imperishable (108). The hazy cloud protects the materialistic society from the overwhelming light of wisdom and knowledge and dilutes them with aesthetic delicacy. Yet, even till now, only the true artists maybe the ones that are leading the path towards religious revelation.

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