Okay, I'll admit it... I waited until 9 pm the night before the blogs were due to start. Yes, I could use that I had a lot of other work, or I was sick this week, or basketball got in the way, but the real reason I didn't start was because I really didn't have anything to say.
Usually I'm one of the people who always has an opinion on books and speaks a lot in class, but for this book I felt differently. Although I did sympathize with Stephen once or twice, I didn't really connect with the characters. I thought it would be hard not to feel something for a character around my age, who goes to Catholic school, and was raised very Catholicly, but alas, I didn't.
Throughout the book I just felt like Joyce was trying too hard to make this something it's not. When Stephen's family has to move house to house because they lost their money, I didn't really feel bad for them. I guess you could say I'm heartless, but I was more caught up in Stephen's inner monologue. The whole book was a little too pretentious for my taste. I feel like Joyce was looking back and trying to make a great story out of his childhood, and while many regard this as one of the greatest works in literature, I felt like he was trying too hard.
Stephen often gets so caught up in his own mind that he starts to see things as symbols, and truly believes it. In class earlier this week we were talking about how Stephen saw the girl in the water, and seemed to see her as a symbol. I pointed out that I thought that was quite pretentious, and someone said that he wasn't pretentious because he wasn't trying to be something he's not, he actually believes what he sees. I think that is a very valid point. Stephen saw that girl and thought it had a deeper meaning. When he saw her he truly believed it meant something, so I cannot hold that against him.
I know this may not be a popular view, but I figure I would just put it out there
I agree that I felt a distance from Stephen's character and his brooding nature for the majority of the novel. For me, the novel wasn't one which I could connect with in terms of coming of age as discovering parallels between Stephen's thought process and my own was a bit difficult. By the end of the novel, I felt a mix of respect towards Stephen for following his passions but I also felt a bit of disdain for his overall somewhat selfish nature
ReplyDeleteI also thought the characters in the novel came off as pretty remote. I ended up finishing the novel with about the same level of ambivalence for Stephen that I started with. A second reading might help me get further into the development of his character, but this initial reading didn't endear him to me all that much.
ReplyDeleteThere's an interesting ambiguity here between *Joyce* "trying too hard" (or inflating his own youthful experience into something "novel-worthy") and Stephen doing the same within the novel itself. Somehow, they can't both be true. Or, I suppose they could, but then what do we do with the persistent irony throughout the novel? We see the process of Stephen coming to see his life in these terms, and at many times he seems pretentious or to have a rather inflated sense of self. But if the author himself were endeavoring to make us take this character completely seriously, he wouldn't depict him in such an often unflattering light.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, it's not always necessary to relate to a character in order to have something meaningful to say about a book.