Abstract:
This study aims to explore how James Joyce employed his main characters as a means to deal with his
preoccupations as a prose-fiction author. These preoccupations distinguish the Joycean hero from the
archetypal hero as presented in the ancient epics and pursued by the mainstream of authors who depict
the impeccable and ideal character that induces the admiration of the reader. John Milton’s Paradise
Lost, however, came to shake this tradition with its three controversial protagonists; Christ, Eve and
Lucifer. Thenceforth, the Romantics of nineteenth-century England praised and celebrated Milton’s Satan
and equally all ‘noble out-laws’ – like Cain and Prometheus – to engender the satanic and Byronic heroes
and even the villain Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. This paper suggests that James
Joyce’s protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man invokes Milton’s Satan in his rejection of
religion and the Byronic hero in his rebel against the social, cultural and political norms of his mother
country Ireland. Then, in his masterpiece, Ulysses, James Joyce builds on his model of the all-round
complete character – Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey – to depict what he identified as the subterranean
forces and hidden tides of humanity. Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s modern Odysseus, is an ordinary
middle-aged (Don-Quixotic antihero) man elevated into an epical ‘titan’ through everyday activities
carried out within eighteen hours on 16-6-1904.
