“Words which he did not understand he said over and over to himself till he had learned them by heart: and through them he had glimpses of the read world about him.”
Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” 52.
In chapter one of “Portrait,” we saw Stephen’s developing mind make sense of the world around him through the investigation of words (ex. when Stephen analyzes the different uses for the word “belt,” or when he meditates on the sound of the word “suck”) (Joyce 7, 8). In chapter two, as Stephen matures, we don’t receive the same associative childlike thinking as before, but can still recognize from the content that we are privy to the workings of Stephen’s mind.