As James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man unfolds, the central theme of isolation and rejection becomes evident.  From birth to adolescence, the protagonist of the story, Stephen Dedalus, responds to his experiences throughout life with actions of rejection and isolation.  He rebels against his environment and isolates himself in schoolwork, family, religion and his art, successively.  James Joyce uses Stephen Dedalus' responses of isolation and rejection to illustrate the journey that the artist must take to achieve adulthood.

    Even as a young boy, Stephen experienced rejection and isolation at school.  On the playground Stephen "felt his body [too] small and weak amid the
[other] players" (Joyce 8).  His schoolmates even poked fun at his name.  In response to his rejection by the other boys Stephen makes a conscious decision to "[keep] on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect" and the other boys.  Stephen is later depicted as choosing the "warm study hall" rather than the playground with his friends outside (Joyce 10).  His rejection at school leads him to isolate himself in his schoolwork, thus putting himself on a scholarly path that will give him the intellectual skills necessary for the artist within him to achieve adulthood.

    In his later years at school, Stephen's isolates himself through his "relationship to authority [and conformity] and his rebellion against it" (Ryf 27).    In the classroom Stephen is "pandied" (beaten with a cane) and accused of being a "lazy little schemer" by a Jesuit priest for not completing his homework due to his broken glasses (Joyce 50).  In rebellion, Stephen reports the injustice to the rector only to later discover that the rector took the incident as a joke.  In another incident, Stephen's schoolmates confront him about the relative merits of Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson.  When the conformists damn Lord Byron as a heretic Stephen responds by affirming Byron's superiority over Tennyson.  The shocked and enraged boys attack Stephen, pinning him against the barbed
wire fence:

-Admit that Byron was no good
-No
-Admit
-No
-Admit
-No.  No.

At last after a fury of plunges he wrenched himself free.  His tormentors set off towards Jones's Road, laughing and jeering at him, while he, torn and flushed and panting, stumbled after them blinded with tears, clenching his fists madly and sobbing (Joyce 82).

    At college, a similar incident supports this idea of isolation caused by rebellion and rejection of authority.  When Stephen refuses to sign a petition to ask for world peace, he suffers criticism from his friends.  Amidst the criticism, however, Stephen dissociates himself from his schoolmates and his environment by saying, " When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.  You talk to me of nationality, language, religion.  I shall try to fly by those nets" (Joyce 203).  Although Stephen isolates himself by rejecting authority and rebelling against conformity, he eventually breaks free from their restrictions to find personal freedom essential for the artist to reach maturity.

    During his adolescent years, Stephen is forced to stay at home due to his father's financial problems causing him to reject his schoolmates and isolate himself in his family.  He spent most of his time with his father and great-uncle and found that "the noise of children at play annoyed him? their silly voices made him feel? that he was different from others" (Joyce 64-65).  When Stephen returned to school, however, he "became aware of his failure to establish communication with his father and the other members of the family" (Ryf 17). Increasingly conscious of the "intellectual abyss" between him and his family, he learns to cherish his solitude (Ryf 28).  Only after slighting his father and refusing to obey his mother's deathbed wishes does Stephen completely reject his family and find freedom from the ties to his youth.

    During his college years, Stephen rejected society and isolated himself in religious piety.  At a religious retreat, he is overwhelmed by the priest's sermon of the horrors of hell and eternal damnation and realizes his own sin.  It was as if "[e]very word of it was for him.  Against his sin, soul and secret, the whole wrath of God was aimed.  The preacher's knife had probed deeply into his disclosed conscience and he felt now that his soul was festering within" (Joyce 115).  Stephen's burden of guilt and shame and the confession that follows lead him to a life of religious piety.  Stephen, however, rejects his religious beliefs after the director of the college directs his attention to the Jesuit order.  He realizes that he can not isolate himself from society through religion because he would rather participate in the world:

The snares of the world were its ways of sin.  He would fall.  He had not
yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant.  Not to fall was too
hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of the soul, as it would be at
some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen,
but about to fall (Joyce 162).

Stephen's rejection of society helps him to discover that he must not retreat from the world but rather participate in it, "snares" and all, thus leading him to accept certain truths of adulthood.

    Stephen's rebellion against conformity and his rejection of his family and religion isolated himself but also allowed himself to free himself from his ties to childhood and his restrictions as an artist.  His freedom becomes evident as the narrator describes the "winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air? a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring imperishable being" (Joyce 169).  Stephen breaks with his past to achieve adulthood and an unrestricted artistic vision that allows him to connect to the world that he had rejected.
 

Bibliography

Connely, Thomas E., Joyce's Portrait Criticisms and Critiques.  Meredith Publishing Company: New York, 1962.

Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The Viking Press: New York, 1916.
 

Litz, A.. Walton, James Joyce.  Twayne Publishers: New York, 1966.
 

Ryf, Robert S., A New Approach to Joyce.  University of California Press: Berkeley, 1962.