A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at Draíocht

James Joyce signalled his need to escape the nets he claimed Ireland would trap him in – religion and nationality. He would seek to fly ‘above these nets’ and thus began his life long task of sketching the universal human condition he had observed around him in Dublin in the real lives of ordinary people. In the course of ‘A Portrait’, which covered the first decades of his life, we see him creating his own individual aesthetic, as opposed to the dictates of the Church. The novel eventually published in 1916, contains some of the most dramatic scenes in modern literature.