As Joyce´s referral biographer Richard Ellman points out in his article Joyce’s religion and politics, Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle on August 1904: “Six years ago (at sixteen) I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. Religion, then, is a key and recurring theme in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something that is logical in a novel that transits from the the Bildungsroman genre to the Künstlerroman, since religion thinking plays a fundamental role in the system of beliefs and values of people, specially in a society so sharply catholic as the Irish Society in the early 20th century.Īlthough when, at advanced age, Joyce was asked about when he left the Church he told that “That’s for the Church to say” he pointed out in several times his position. Religion shapes Stephen’s home life, his school life, his introduction into the Irish policy, his expectations, much of the books he reads, and even the language he uses. I shall try to fly by those nets” (220)) three “nets” indissolubly linked by religion (as the central element) with an almost permanent presence in the novel interacting and influencing continuously all the others issues addressed.

You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. Three are the elements that accompany Stephen as a child and teenager (“When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. Religion in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Artist as a young man