Adult Stephen (with #nofilter)

This polar vortex had me cooped up in my bedroom really feeling that loneliness that Stephen bestowed upon himself continuously (like Stephen at the kid’s party, I could have embraced the spirit of socialization by going downstairs and playing MarioKart with my brother but no, I sulked in my despair in not being able to leave the house… the media we consume really does affect us.) These free days did, however, allow me to read to the end of this novel, and boy was it an ending!

When the narrative switched from a third-person narrative to Stephen’s own first-person journal, the novel simultaneously changed and came together at once. In hindsight, this writing format fits inside the structure of the novel perfectly -- we start the novel with an outsider, Mr. Daedelus, reading to Stephen, followed by a continuous narrative with free indirect discourse that follows Stephen’s thoughts as he develops from a child to an adolescent to a young adult, then we finally hear from his own voice. In a way, the rate of this gradual transition from third- to first-person narrative is directly proportional to Stephen’s growth in his sense of self. At the beginning of the novel, he had only his parents’ values and the church’s morals available to him as information he could act upon. Mid-novel, we see him learning from his experiences by finding ways to cope (eg. torturing senses), and learning how to choose for himself (eg. when he was asked to priesthood). By the end of this novel, he begins to form his own thoughts and challenge his free will in his adulthood (eg. telling his mother he does not feel tied to religion anymore, not wanting to continue at university.) Because he is now able to think for himself, he doesn’t filter his opinions through the people around him, and therefore does not need an outsider’s transcription of his thoughts - thus, we are given his journal entries.

Then again, these journal entries prove that Stephen is not a completely new person. In fact, tidbits of his past sneak into a few of these entries, proving that Stephen is still the same edgy 12-year-old, but is just able to mask his edgy side more eloquently than he used to before. He still has nightmares when he sleeps, found in his March 25th entry that details a group of phosphorescent-faced, short, and silent creatures that peer directly into his soul after climbing out of a cave, standing before kings that kneel in weariness regarding the “people’s” sins -- this reminded me of the goat-faced human creatures that haunted him in an earlier chapter. His imagination is still racing and can even haunt him in adulthood. In his April 5th entry, he says he sees the eyes of girls among the leaves and delicate flowers of spring, seeing only those with “fair or auburn” skin: “no dark ones”. So he’s still seeing women as images, but now in an even more complex way, finding the thought of women in non-human organisms. And about Emma -- well, he still is nervous around her after all these years just as he was on the tram, worrying that he “looked like a fellow throwing a handful peas into the air” in his April 15th entry. This all goes to show that no matter how much self-discovery and experience someone has, it’s inevitable that you’re going to be some kind of product of your past. x