A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It would be a gloomy secret night. After early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner.

Five-chapter arc from infancy through hell sermon and Marian epiphany to university flight; lyric episodes substitute for conventional plot mechanics, so plot scores 85.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

Stephen Dedalus anchors every page while Simon, Dante, Cranly, and Lynch function as ideological foils; the infant-voice opening establishes cast through perception rather than exposition, so cast scores 84.

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flour-fattened sauce.

Episodic Künstlerroman with dense set-pieces (Ch.III sermon, Ch.IV theology) that halt forward motion for pages; the schoolroom hunger passage typifies deliberate modernist tempo, so pace scores 80.

The equation on the page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being born and being quenched.

Infant babble to mature artist manifesto in one novel—free indirect style, liturgical parody, and the peacock-tail equation passage rank among the most influential prose in English, so prose scores 97.

It would be a gloomy secret night. After early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy.

Dublin at the turn of the century—Clongowes, Belvedere, brothel quarter, university—interiorized through Stephen's evolving perception rather than external panorama, so world scores 88.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.... He was baby tuckoo.

"Once upon a time... moocow... baby tuckoo" instantly signals that familiar fairy-tale grammar will be exploded from inside infant consciousness, so hook scores 93.

Every morning he hallowed himself anew in the presence of some holy image or mystery. His day began with an heroic offering of its every moment of thought or action for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff and with an early mass.

Definitive modernist bildungsroman—stream-of-consciousness development, epiphany structure, and artist-as-forger metaphor; virtually every subsequent literary coming-of-age novel is in dialogue with it, so innov scores 98.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

"Forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" is one of modernism's great declarative exits; April diary entries earn the manifesto through four chapters of renunciation, so ending scores 94.