"Cliff Notes - Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

Cork, a city on the southern coast of Ireland, his father's drunken
bragging embarrasses him, and he is forced to face the fact that
Simon Dedalus is a failure who has squandered the family's income.
The Dedalus family sinks lower into poverty. The prize money Stephen
wins for earning high marks on national exams occasionally helps to
brighten a dreary life, but when the money is spent the family's
troubles return. He is left isolated from his uncultured parents,
feeling not like their true son but like a foster child.

Stephen is also tormented by wild romantic and sexual longings. He
focuses these feelings on a young woman, called E. C. or Emma, for
whom he has written some verses. But Emma disappoints him when she
doesn't wait after he has finished a performance of a school play.
The restless, moody lad, now about fourteen, finally satisfies his
sexual urges in the arms of a prostitute.

Soon Stephen is regularly visiting Dublin's red-light district and
exulting in what he feels is his liberation. He prides himself on
not going to confession or to Mass. But guilt lurks under his
swagger. The fiery sermons of a Jesuit priest, Father Arnall, evoke
the tortures of a Hell to which Stephen fears he may be condemned.
In an agony of remorse, he attends confession and returns home,
feeling holy and happy.

Stephen's new piety seems so heartfelt that the director of his
school gives him the opportunity to join the Jesuits. He finds the
vision of priestly knowledge and power briefly tempting, but then
rejects it because he prefers "the disorder and misrule" of a
nonreligious life to the austere and bloodless order of the
priesthood. His true calling, he believes, is to the world of the
intellect. As he walks along the shore of Dublin Bay, he spies a
girl walking. She seems to him as free and proud as a seabird, and
she becomes a symbol of the new creative life he hopes to lead.

Stephen's years at University College reinforce his decision to
become a great writer. While his classmates concentrate their
energies on Irish politics and culture, Stephen buries himself in his
own personal artistic theories and in his poetry. His self-absorbed
brilliance causes his friends to consider him an intellectual freak.
In turn he feels superior to them.

Romantic and sexual longings still trouble him. When he believes
Emma is flirting with a young priest, he grows jealous and convinces
himself that she is unworthy. Yet in his fantasies, he continues to
transform her into an erotic temptress.

Proudly, regretfully, Stephen sees that he has made himself a
stranger to the world that was his at birth--to his family, to
Dublin, to Ireland, to Catholicism. He can no longer believe in
them, and he proclaims that he can no longer serve what he does not