Joyce's Comic Portrait

In the first book-length study of the comedic in <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, Roy Gottfried argues that, far from being a solemn work, Joyce’s early masterpiece is covertly but determinedly comic. Specifically, he looks at the <i>Portrait’s</i> narrative structure, the protagonist Stephen’s conscious disavowal of humor, and Joyce’s comic use of word-play, vulgarity, and gendered language to establish the work’s doubled nature.