INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH CULTURE SOCIETY

James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man foregrounds the significance of naming as a crucial narrative and symbolic strategy. This article examines the mytho-symbolic implications of the protagonist’s name, “Stephen Dedalus,” and argues that Joyce deliberately fuses Christian martyrdom and classical artistry to construct Stephen’s modernist identity. The name “Stephen” evokes St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, signifying resistance, sacrifice, and defiance of religious authority, while “Dedalus” alludes to Daedalus, the mythical Greek artificer whose ingenuity enables escape from confinement. Through stream-of-consciousness narration, Joyce aligns Stephen’s psychological, aesthetic, and vocational development with these dual mythic trajectories. The article contends that the symbolic resonance of the name functions as a structural principle guiding Stephen’s evolution from institutional imprisonment—family, religion, and nation—towards artistic self-liberation. By embedding myth within modernist subjectivity, Joyce redefines the artist as both rebel and creator, forging a new aesthetic conscience beyond inherited traditions.