"He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words so beautiful and sad like music." ?from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce's semi-autobiographical and an early example of his modernist techniques is one the most major examples of the Künstlerroman containing a mixture of sympathy and irony.

James Joyce describes in this novel young Stephen Dedalus' intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening as he starts his quest and to question and rise against the Irish-Catholic conventions with which he has been brought up.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man containing a number of references to the politics religion of the early 20th century Ireland is among the best examples of the use of stream of consciousness and has been ranked by the Modern Library as the third greatest English-language novel of the 20th century.