James Joyce and the Life Cycle: The Unfolded Picture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2595-8127.v4i1p113-124Keywords:
James Joyce, Life cycle, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans WakeAbstract
Joyce in his fiction ambitiously attempted to capture the whole of the human life cycle “from infancy through maturity to decay,” as he graphically phrases it in Ulysses (697). Beginning with the child’s earliest memories in A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and progressing through the vicissitudes of childhood, recorded in that novel along with the early stories in Dubliners, Joyce went on to analyze adolescence and early adulthood in the middle stories
in Dubliners, as well as in the bulk of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. He then memorably depicted the middle mature years in his portrait of Leopold
and Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Finally, he pictured the evening of life in “The Dead” and its end and re-beginning in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s works taken as
a whole from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners through Ulysses and Exiles to Finnegans Wake – embody Erik Erickson’s “meaningful
interplay between beginning and end as well as some finite sense of summary and, possibly, a more active anticipation of dying.”
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