fantastic

[Jessica]

I haven't found POTAAAYM to be difficult, just slow. Joyce really mastered the stream of conciousness thing - the subtle repetition spanning pages, the shifts, they're all perfectly logical. People think soc is simple, but it's not at all... Stephen is so damn pompous in his early adolescence I wanted to strangle him; all that talk of being a restless, tormented outsider made me laugh. I don't have to struggle to believe any part of the book - everything makes sense. It helps that I, like any irish-catholic lit dork, see myself in Stephen. The only problem there is that I've already been through the lucid realization of sin and feel past it in a way.