“This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am." How is the theme of ‘coming of age’ presented in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s semi-autobiographical bildungsroman published in 1916, follows its hero, Stephen Dedalus, on a twenty year journey from infancy to adulthood. Joyce employs the innovative techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness narrative to show how thought and memory function, and the writing reflects Stephen’s gradual discovery of the capabilities of his mind. The majority of events in the novel relate to Stephen’s attendance at Clongowes School and Belvedere College, to which his most formative memories of adolescence refer. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, takes an alternative, magnified approach and follows protagonist Holden Caulfield’s development over a single weekend. It is an intense psychological reflection and begins as Holden is expelled from Pencey Preparatory School, for under-achieving in class. The Catcher in the Rye is written entirely in the first person, Holden’s thoughts shaping the narrative as he experiences and rejects various rites of passage. While both novels take the form of the bildungsroman, Holden Caulfield is perhaps a contradictory character within this genre, as he remains resistant to the pull of adulthood.
The opening lines of A Portrait of the Artist…, ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road...’, represent Stephen’s infancy. ‘Moocow’, a childlike word, reflects the simplicity of Stephen’s early thought, and the fact that the novel opens with a story foreshadows the importance of the Arts in his life. Hints of Stephen’s creativity, and of his later detachment from religion, another key theme of the novel, are provided early on. While he enjoys the colourful imagery of the Bible – ‘The imagery of the psalms of prophecy soothed his barren pride.’ – he does not accept the message the words convey, and throughout the novel he expresses a heightening sense of independence from his Catholic upbringing. First the young Stephen begins to question religion thoughtfully; ‘Why was the sacrament of the Eucharist instituted under the two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood, soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone?’ He then experiments with delinquency; ‘All through his boyhood he had mused upon that which he had so often thought to be his destiny and when the moment had come for him to obey the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward instinct.’ These lines show that Stephen is excited by the novelty of disobedience he feels when initially rejecting the discipline of religion, the word ‘wayward’ denoting behaviour uncharacteristic for him. He becomes disgusted by religion, as illustrated in his description of his teachers; ‘Their dull piety and the sickly smell of the cheap hair-oil with which they had anointed their heads repelled him from the altar they prayed at.’ He has begun to perceive the priests in a negative, detrimental way, and the disdainful words, ’dull’, ‘sickly’ and ‘repelled’, emphasise his resentment.