24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce

I remember at school listening to a panel discussion of Lord of the Flies where they pondered and discussed what Golding must have meant when he wrote certain things. In one instance they spent at least twenty minutes discussing what was meant by Golding choosing a black child as second in command to Jack amongst the boys. They settled on the idea that this was to highlight the darkness of man's character and that what came after Jack would be much much worse... what I saw however was that it was more likely that Golding made a decision that he would quite like to have a child who happened to be black!

I have never understood the need in a literary setting to spend so long discussing what may have been meant by an author choosing one word over another, or interpreting the what they must have been inferring by a certain character trait. That is until I read Confessions of a Justified Sinner earlier on this year and again after reading this book.

Quite simply I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

I have spent the last three weeks struggling through hoping that the next chapter will provide some illumination as to why this is regarded as a classic (although I should be grateful that unlike Confessions this at least had chapters). In the end I gave up about half way through and sat with an online version of Spark Notes detailing what the hell was happening and what it meant.

What makes all of this worse is despite all of this I am still not sure what Joyce is trying to tell us in this book. So the story is unclear without a literary guide, and even with it, it makes little sense... One to avoid I feel!