Shifts of Time in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Narratological Perspective

Abstract

One of the main issues in narratology is the concept of time. The centrality of time is echoed in Ricouer’s (1984) debates when he says narratives are one of the many ways by which time can be actualized. The present study is to investigate the concept of time as well as the shifts of time in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (A Portrait) in the light of Genette’s (1980) model. Being a modern novel, A Portrait travels through the experiences of its narrator utilizing the stream of consciousness technique. Time takes the reader back and forth immersing him/her in the narrator’s experience. It becomes frozen in some parts while expands in other parts, by detailed descriptions of a moment of its narrator’s feelings, thoughts, and experience. For all these, the present study will focus on this novel from the point of view of time and temporal shifts. The article tries to show the instances as well as the quality of time shifts. For this, Genette’s model of time is considered: the three techniques of order (analepsis and prolepsis), duration (pause, scene, ellipsis, summary, and stretch), and frequency (singulative, repetitive, and iterative). The results demonstrate that all the components of Genette’s model have been shifted. The most time shift instances in each category were: analepsis (37 times), pause (118 times), iterative frequency (53 times). This shows the predominant use of pause in this novel which is a novel of stream of consciousness, too. Pause is mainly hired for describing the protagonist’s (Stephen) state of mind and what he thinks.