The Art Of Narrative Time Of James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (hereafter A Portrait),Joyce's first important autobiographical novel, narrates the story ofStephen Dedalus, a boy growing up in Ireland at the end of the nineteenthcentury. As he grew older and became mentally matured, he made up hismind to shake off those social, familial, and religious shackles and live alife committed to the art of writing.A Portrait is immensely innovative in the history of Englishliterature. Throughout Joyce's writing career, the birth of A Portrait is ofmilestone significance, as it is essentially a link between Dubliners andUlysses. Under the influence of French avant-garde writers, Joyceforegrounded the art of time within this sophisticated work blended withmany modernist narrative elements. His audacious effort to disassembleand reassemble the story time leads to a temporally chiastic but unifiedarchitecture that not only evades flat narration but also well displays theway moderners think. As a consequence, this thesis will dwell upon theorder, duration and narrative frequency of A Portrait and thus bring tolight its diversified temporal art.Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with the theoretical basis of thethesis: the binary opposition of story time and narrative time. In addition,this chapter traces the eleven-year revision of A Portrait during which Joyce forsook the sequential design of episodes and created a labyrinth oftransfigured story time by means of magnified discordance of the twotemporal levels.Chapter 2 underscores the order of A Portrait. As to the temporalsequence of events, Joyce made bulky use of analepses in the principalpart of the novel. However, he shuffled the temporal sequence whilepopping out the diachronic narrative progression, which assumes adistinctive centripetal orientation inherited from the narrative tradition.Moreover, he practiced an effective use of achrony in the diary finale.The temporal autonomy at the ending precisely reflects Joyce's initialdeviation from the narrative tradition in terms of temporality.Chapter 3 highlights the duration of A Portrait. Upon the basis ofthe novel's interaction of history and fiction, this chapter, leaving outmost analepses, tentatively restores a relative chronology of the story. Inaddition, this chapter respectively probes five types of narrative tempo:summary, scene, pause, stretch and ellipsis.Chapter 4 accentuates the narrative frequency of A Portrait. Puttingaside two singulative types, this chapter focuses itself upon repetitionsand iterations: narrating n times what happened once and narrating oncewhat happened n times. The former would diversify the same event interms of either the style or the perspective. The latter is a synthesis ofrecurrent events over a certain period of time. Moreover, this chapter clarifies the chiastic mode of alternations of singulative and iterative in APortrait.In short, the research on narrative time is a synthetic one, as order,duration, and narrative frequency are more or less interrelated. As a result,the connections between story time and narrative time should be takeninto full account in the research of narrative time. Apropos of the creationof A Portrait, Joyce took the initiative to steer and alter the nexusbetween story time and narrative time. When he distorted and subvertedthe story time, he created a new sort of temporality which harmoniouslyunified the mechanic clock which governed the diachronic movement ofthe story and the psychological clock which reined the protagonist'smemory.