Just as he put Gogarty
into the novel in the fictional person of Buck Mulligan, Joyce
included himself as "Stephen Dedalus," an autobiographical
persona whom he had introduced in his first published novel, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
A Portrait finally appeared in 1916, after countless
abortive drafts as Stephen Hero
and serial appearances in the magazine The Egoist.
It is a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel) or Künstlerroman
(an artist's version of the same). When Joyce began writing Ulysses
in 1914, he decided to continue the story of Stephen Dedalus.
He wrote to Ezra Pound in 1915 that his new book "is a
continuation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
after three years' interval blended with many of the persons
of Dubliners" (Ellmann, 383).
After two pages representing very early childhood, A
Portrait follows Stephen’s development from the time of
his first entering Clongowes
Wood College (which Joyce did at age 6) through his
university days (Joyce attended University College Dublin from
1898 to 1902, ages 16 to 20). Although the novel follows the
general outlines of some significant events in Joyce’s life,
it is never specific as to dates.
Ulysses is highly specific in most things, and on
this day, June 16, 1904, Stephen is 22 years old (as Joyce
himself had been). Like Joyce in the years 1902-1904, Stephen
has decided to become a writer; he has introduced himself to
many of the leading figures on the
Dublin literary scene; he has moved to Paris to escape
Irish provincialism; and, after receiving news that his mother is dying, he has
returned home to a life of less glamorous poverty and very
uncertain prospects. The companions with whom he conducted
long peripatetic conversations at the end of A Portrait—Cranly, Lynch, Davin
(themselves modeled loosely on some of Joyce’s university
friends)—have been replaced by Buck Mulligan, and after this
day Stephen will need a replacement for Mulligan.
