Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains thematic influences such as class divide, one of a child who has experienced a coisted upbringing, well loved by his mother and father. His consciousness describes his relationship with his father from the outset, in a child-like manner “baby tuckoo” and “moocow”. Stephen was looked after when at home; he had his uncles “Charles” and “Dante” who clapped when his mother danced. This shows a happy environment, a family together, until the “Vances” who came from a fractured home. Stephen is taken off to boarding school where he is unprepared for the rigours of school due to his overly protected previous lifestyle. A paragraph describes himself as having a “body small and weak” and his “eyes were weak and watery” when comparing himself to the other “fellows” or rough kids like Nasty Roche. Stephen’s mother had instructed him “not to speak with the rough boys at college” perhaps suggesting he was above them and didn’t need to mix with the lower echelons of society.
Charles Dickens alludes to subjects similar to the previous novel, such as death. Pip visits his parents “tombstone” and attempts to derive a mental image of what they would look like from the “shapes of the letters” on the graves. His “five little brothers” also are buried next to his parents who died “exceedingly early” this goes to highlight how much suffering Pip has endured, a “universal struggle” but not just for him, all those who we’re lower class of the era perhaps. Religion is briefly introduced, which Pip has embraced in adult life as he states “I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained” then continues “that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trouser-pockets” suggesting a ethos of religious overtures, but also his brothers had died as infants and had moved on to another “existence”. For this belief perhaps Pip has embraced religion and found solace within theology. Pip has also been educated throughout his later life as he uses etymology such as “childish conclusion” and “stone lozenges” finally “sacred” this isn’t language of the illiterate of the age.
An attitude of sympathy can be garnered from both authors perhaps. Joyce would be one of abandonment through choice and Dickens abandonment through enforcement. Stephen being abandoned after his early years by his loving parents to boarding school where he is unprepared for the harsh realities of life, the differential children with their “fathers and mothers and different clothes and voices” whom are like an alien race to him, Stephen is almost xenophobic. Then Pip in turn has had his situation enforced upon him by mother-nature, death of all of his family members in this case. This situation isn’t so foreign to him, as he has had time to adapt as he is now an adult, when comparing to Stephen.
Conveyance of Joyce’s chapter one shows an omniscient narrator fragmented tone, which helps to suggest a discontented childhood being project from the stream of consciousness. As the chapter opens with the child-like references and then is interrupted by song and a memory of experience when he “wet the bed”, the story continues and introduces his other family member, life at school and the suffering he is enduring mentally within it. Dickens in contrast is the reverse; he employs a much more coherent narrative, which flows with descriptive tone, encompassing formal language on the whole, and so non-colloquial. The final paragraph highlights this by being one long sentence when Dickens writes about the environment surrounding Pip, the tone turns almost mournful, depressing but powerful, examples of this are the “dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard” almost suggesting a wild-thing beyond towards the “distant savage lair”. This helps convey the mood greatly.
Place and environment play a large part in both novels; Great Expectations adopts a descriptive environment which is not safe, whereas Joyce’s encapsulates a safe environment, however not as descriptive as the writer is paying more attention to the people currently in Stephen’s life, however Joyce does describe the playground as “wide” that was “swarming with boys”. An example of the environment surrounding Pip is answered in the third paragraph when he describes the “marsh country” and continues that the “river wound”. Later he goes on to tell us about the “bleak place overgrown with nettle” which is encroaching around the church.
There is a slightly different evolutionary process to both main protagonists, Pip is characterised as both a child and adult, in comparison Stephen is only written about from a child or early teenager. Focusing upon Pip firstly as a child, he is characterised as never knowing his parents and has to derives child-like images from the tombstones his father being “square... dark man, with curly black hair” and his mother “freckled and sickly” only a child imagination could decipher such a picture from “stone lozenges”. He’s uneducated with an “infant tongue” and decides to call himself Pip instead of his longer more explicit name. The introduction of Pip the adult is injected throughout the second paragraph when he describes the “five little stone lozenges” that we’re his little brothers and there “universal struggle” but died with “hands in their trouser-pockets” this is language of an educated adult, not of a child. To enforce this, there is the description of rural life, the river, dykes and mounds, the cattle feeding, giving a feeling of maturity.
Stephen is a child and the language uses says that way, as before highlight upon the childish names “baby tuckoo” for himself, and “moocow” project this, when he “wet the bed” his mother change the linen and put a “oilsheet” down. The continual repetition of rhymes “Tralala lala, Tralala tralaladdy” you can almost imagine a child dancing around in circle humming this to them self. As previously mentioned the way Stephen is alluded to as small compared to the other boys in the playground, help form a image of a cowering little boy who is last to be picked for football. Finally the closeness of the family, his father telling him a story, the singing and dancing around his mother and uncle as the “clapped”. Stephen’s mother telling him not to speak with “rough boys” he thinks “Nice mother”, and then he thought on the day they said goodbye to him as “her nose and eyes were red”.
Both sections of their respective novels clearly have a statement of intent, both commenting upon social mobility, both looking from a child’s perspective and finally both looking at separation from loved ones, whether enforced or not. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man could be seen to be much harder to decipher than the structure flowing Great Expectations, however both apply moral but also social issues of the era, which is why they are both lauded.
