A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the transitional stage between the realism of Joyce's "Dubliners" and the symbolism of "Ulysses", and is essential to the understanding of the later work

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays Stephen's Dublin childhood and youth and, in doing so, provides an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. At its center are questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in its style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero's quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race".