As a condensed version of Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man extracts epiphanic moments of Stephen's life to form a baseline of the development of Stephen from a young child to a budding artist. While all the epiphanies only take up a small fraction of Stephen's life, heavy emphasis is laid upon these events as much of the novel is spent detailing them. Each chapter depicts Stephen using a trivial detail to unlock something profound about his life, and the course of his life is altered accordingly. The structure of these events leads to the discourse of literary devices such as symbols and imageries, which helps push forward the development of the story.
             A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a self-portrait James Joyce painted in the form of an autobiography. Like an artist, Joyce understands the lack of depth that linear narrative offers and replaces it with a more sophisticated spatial narration. Time is dispatched according to the importance of the events and often, most of the chapter is spent depicting little details, leaving only a few lines to cover the remaining gap between events for the continuity of the novel. The arbitrary treatment of time is meant to point towards a different order of events, one which focuses on the epiphanic moments of Stephen's life. Instead of unfolding the story in chronological order, stream of consciousness is used as the narrative technique, disconnecting the sequence of events with unrelated thoughts. Due to the lack of maturity in early age, Stephen's childhood is brought up in clips of memory which are significant to his character development. For instance, his years in Clongowes is blurred except for two events, the Christmas dinner and the unjust punishment of Father Dolan, both impacting his view of the mature world around him. The lack of transition between two adjacent chapters can be easily spotted where large gaps of time escape with no descr...