"I Will Not Serve": Stephen Dedalus? Anguished Self-Consciousness?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has distinguished itself since its publication as a novel that traces the growth of a child from childhood through youth to adulthood. This paper investigatesthe impact of this growth on the character, interrogating why Stephen Dedalus’ refusal to serve his church, family and country is spoken with such papal finality. It equally investigates why the young Dedalus, trained in the best catholic Jesuit institutions of his country, given good family attention categorically rejects church, family and country all these in favour of his own very personal ideological inclinations? The paper locates Stephen’s rebellion to the very social and political sources that shape his vision of life; and his final decision of disobedience result from his inability to manage accumulated self-consciousness. The paper therefore concludes that Dedalus is ideologically motivated and his refusal to serve is the outcome of his overwhelming anguished self-consciousness, the product of a troubled growth.