OCR: NEA recommended text
If the first few pages of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man serve as a kind of beginning, what do they begin? If they’re meant to bring our protagonist before us — at least in the way readers are used to — they could hardly do a worse job. By the time of Portrait’s publication in 1916, readers had had more than a century’s worth of novels that could bring characters into quick, sharp focus, as though welcoming them onto a stage. In the hands of Austen or Dickens, that first appearance could inspire in the reader not only a sense of pleasure, but also a kind of recognition —a sense of understanding the characters from the very start.
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