Puzzle #247: Four Last Things (Crossmess Parzel #3)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce's outline of his own early life through the avatar of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus. It begins with his childhood (announced by the opening words, "Once upon a time") and tracks his oscillations between periods of hedonism and deep religiosity. Perhaps the centerpiece of Portrait is the scene where Stephen listens to Father Arnall's sermon on the Four Last Things - death, judgment, hell, and heaven. This sermon is the impetus for Stephen to abandon sensual pursuits and return to the Catholic Church, but that return is short-lived; the confines of the church (and of Irish culture writ large) can't accommodate his artistic ambitions. When he sees a girl bathing along Dollymount Strand, he (in one of Joyce's characteristic epiphanies) experiences an intense urge to describe her beauty in prose. He becomes further alienated from both the church and from his homeland, realizing in the end that his aesthetic ambitions are incompatible with a life in Ireland.

But he still retains a deep love for his homeland, and hopes to help craft a new Irish identity through his writing. He concludes the novel by writing: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Inspired by the Four Last Things, this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) charts the four major aspects of Dedalus/Joyce's life in Portrait: childhood development, Catholic faith, sensualism, and finally aestheticism - an aestheticism that, as we will see in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, aims to radically break free from all sorts of strictures.

Made by Will Nediger with the online cross word maker from Amuse Labs