Double-reading early Joyce: The necessity of contrapuntal readings of 'Dubliners' and 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' (James Joyce, Ireland)

Many of James Joyce's earliest critics read the author's protagonists in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sympathetically and often as representative of Joyce himself. Later critics such as Hugh Kenner demonstrated how the protagonists do not have Joyce's full authorial sympathy but are rather undercut by his use of subtle irony. Whereas a third tendency most recently in Joycean criticism has been to emphasize mystery and insolvability, this dissertation presents the following thesis in an attempt to bridge the gap between sympathy and distance: both the straightforward reading and the ironic reading of Joyce's early protagonists are not only necessary, but also quite interrelated and dependent on each another. This contrapuntal strategy allows Joyce to give more complex answers to important questions than either the straightforward or ironic critique will acknowledge. My procedure, however, unlike the approach taken by many recent critics emphasizing insolvability, does not lead to complete indeterminacy of interpretation; rather, this contrapuntal reading invites the critic to see the necessity of both the traditional and the ironic approach. In this dissertation, complete chapters further contrapuntal readings of the young boy of "Araby," Gabriel Conroy of "The Dead," and---perhaps most significantly---Stephen Dedalus of Portrait . A final chapter discusses stories of Dubliners for which a contrapuntal approach may appear more problematic and concludes with a brief section discussing the implications of a contrapuntal argument for the study of Joyce's later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.