The Diary As An Experimental Style: A Stylistics Approach To Joyce’s A Portrait

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the necessary transition between Joyce’s epiphany and his stream-of-consciousness style.The whole novel consists of 5 Sections and 22 diaries,with Stephen Dedalus’ academic growth,in each chapter,Joyce uses different language styles to portray his growing process.Especially,in the fragmented22 diaries kept from the March,20 to April,27,Joyce employs the first-person internal point of view and foregrounded language,revealing Stephen’s complicated mental flow,which is,as we believe,the trial of his early stream-of-consciousness style,laying a foundation for his large experimentation Ulysses.Although some scholars have noticed this point,there is no detailed investigation into the diary style with a stylistics approach.Therefore,this thesis discusses the stylistic features,their stylistic effects and narrative technique in the diary style,hoping to provide a new angle for a better understanding and evaluation of the novel and Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness style.The diary at the end of this novel belongs to a special genre,revealing Stephen’s psychological changes.By close reading,we find that in order to vividly present the character’s consciousness,Joyce adopts the informal or spoken language to simulate the fleeting emotions and thoughts.The adoption of colloquialism makes the character’s personality more distinctive and accessible to readers,for example,Stephen shows his hatred for being colonized by British rulers through the word “damn”;the lexical innovations are leaving an eye-catching effect on its readers,highlighting Joyce’s language gift;by using verbs of mental process,Joyce shows readers that Stephen has his own perception and reaction to the people and surroundings,reflecting his gradual independence and maturity.In addition,Joyce demonstrates Stephen’s trivial and random thoughts by using typical grammatical deviations.Incomplete sentences or broken sentences are not only the stylistic features of stream-of-consciousness style but also the stylistic presentation of Stephen’s language patterns;Influenced by Bergson’s principle of “psychological time”,Joyce organizes the plots and settings in different time together,so that readers may experience the jumbling and disorder of time and Stephen’s consciousness;by employing the inverted clauses,Joyce emphasizes Stephen’s feelings about the surrounding and satirizes his countrymen’s ignorance,leaving readers with one suspense after another,arousing their curiosity.Joyce also uses some figures of speech,giving the novel poetic and musical value.Phonological schemes,such as assonance and alliteration,bring the compact,harmonious and attractive effect to the novel;the rhetorical repetition intensifies Stephen’s feelings;through symbolism,Joyce shows readers the confusion Stephen faced when he decides his self-exile,leaving the artistic effects on the novel.Through first-person internal point of view and interior monologue,Joyce vividly reveals Stephen’s gradual maturity on thoughts,art and literature and shows his loneliness.After the analysis on these informal style markers and their effects in the diary,we find that the diary style in A Portrait is a trial on Joyce’s early stream-of-consciousness style,paving the way for his later creation.