The Joycean Romantic all-round antihero

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.