A Cohesive Presence: The Girl Image As Subtext In James Joyce’s “A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man”

This study deals with the girl characters in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . It presents a close reading of the references to these figures with special attention to the word stock of the relevant text fragments. The examination reveals a great number of recurrent lexical and structural elements. They combine the individual fragments into one cohesive subtext that conveys a coherent girl image.