The symbolic meaning of the sea in Joyce's : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Abstract EN

Sea water, throughout the ages, exerts a profound influence on English literature in general and the novel in particular being a fertile source wherefrom novelists can borrow images and symbols.

Such is the case, water imagery and its derivative, be it what it may be, are exploited by James Joyce as a means whereby he combines the modernist focus on the city with a universal perspective including the sea making out of the sea a meditative gate for the realization of the world.

This paper explores the centrality of the sea water, whatever their symbolic value may be, to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The sea, throughout of the novel, ties some bi-movements as death-life, constraint-freedom, finite-infinite circles.