The novel is a Bildungsroman and captures the essence of character growth and understanding of the world around him. The novel mixes third-person narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier Stephen Hero informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write "some pages of sorry verse", while A Portrait gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader.[31]
The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin[b] and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist aesthetic theory in an extended dialogue. According to Sanders, "… it is the eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas that most determines the complex aesthetics that Stephen expounds. Although his faith is replaced by scrupulous doubt, Stephen retains an insistent Jesuit authoritarianism in his arguments about definitions of beauty. As the latter stages of the story affirm, Stephen assumes a new priesthood, that of the artist".[32] Joyce employs first-person narration for Stephen's diary entries in the concluding pages of the novel, perhaps to suggest that Stephen has finally found his own voice and no longer needs to absorb the stories of others.[33] Joyce fully employs the free indirect style to demonstrate Stephen's intellectual development from his childhood, through his education, to his increasing independence and ultimate exile from Ireland as a young man. The style of the work progresses through each of its five chapters, as the complexity of language and Stephen's ability to comprehend the world around him both gradually increase.[34] The book's opening pages communicate Stephen's first stirrings of consciousness when he is a child. Throughout the work language is used to describe indirectly the state of mind of the protagonist and the subjective effect of the events of his life.[35]
The writing style is notable also for Joyce's omission of quotation marks: he indicates dialogue by beginning a paragraph with a dash, as is commonly used in French, Spanish or Russian publications.
The first two pages of A Portrait introduce many of the novel's key motifs,[36] and have been shown to "enact the entire action in microcosm".[37]
Joyce introduced the concept of "epiphany" in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Thomas Aquinas's three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object "seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany".[38] The term isn't used when Stephen Dedalus explains his aesthetic theory in A Portrait. Joyce critics, however, have used it freely when discussing the novel as well as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.[39][40][41] One critic has identified four distinct epiphany techniques in Joyce's fiction,[42] saying of A Portrait that "in at least three instances an epiphany helps Stephen decide on the future courses of this life".[43]
Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory identifies three forms of literary art: lyric, epic, and dramatic.[44] The Canadian scholar Hugh Kenner sees the three forms of literary art as a progression that applies to his novels, with A Portrait being lyric, Ulysses epic, and Finnegans Wake dramatic.[45] William York Tindall has noted that other critics have applied the three forms differently, some finding all Joyce's works dramatic, one finding all three forms in A Portrait, another finding them in Ulysses "with more justification from the text perhaps".[46] Tindall has speculated on how they might apply to A Portrait, Stephen being "lyric in his attitude toward himself", Joyce being dramatic in his attitude toward Stephen, so that at times "he is the author of a dramatic book about a lyric hero", while at other times he is an ironist and so "seems epic... standing between audience and victim".[47]
