Part IV: The Resistance

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lends itself quite well to my question. Because art = relative. The end. So on a small scale, the way Stephen judges what is pure and what is obscene is pretty much the same as my whole shtick. Pretty cool, right? Stephen spends most of his time in his head thinking about what it good and what is evil. He battles with what he is told by the church and his own independent thoughts. The conclusion it seems that he eventually comes to is that only he can decide what is right and wrong in his eyes. His spends his entire childhood being told what is and isn't a sin and he eventually ends up questioning what makes these things sins or pure acts. That is when he decides that he can't let someone else tell him what is a sin when he might think it is totally natural. Obviously if he thought murder was totally natural, it'd be a problem. Then we'd be working in some gray areas. But the point is, Joyce seems to offer up the possibility that it is the individual's responsibility to determine what is good and what is evil. Curious.