James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man delves into Stephen Dedalus' inner psyche on his journey of becoming an artist. Although there is no specific death is this novel, the ideas of life and death and religion are largely questioned by Stephen within the novel. According to the Catholic religion, there is a heaven and hell in the afterlife and your actions determine where you will end up when you die, or at least that is how Stephen sees it. Stephen deals with sin, guilt, redemption and questioning when it comes to his faith, but he also deals with the idea of mortality. This realization of mortality is seen throughout his development as a writer and as a young man. He struggles with being a man of the church and chasing his dreams of being a writer. Will choosing to be a writer mean he will go to hell once he dies?
Personally, I am still developing my religious ideals, but the idea of heaven and hell frustrates me to no end. I relate to Stephen with his struggles to be the best person he can be and fit into the church definition of being a "good" person. I also am an artist, although not a writer like Stephen (even if I write on occasion), and I feel that you have to take a step back from any religion to view the world artistically. Perhaps that's not true, but I feel that it helps me at least. Regardless, I think the fear of our human mortality and the question of our afterlives haunts us all at one point in time. We can hope for the best, but aren't we all a little scared of the possibility of going to hell? There are many religious and personal beliefs of what happens in the afterlife, not just heaven and hell. But Stephen directly faces this question of heaven and hell with his art and his curiosity. Just like Stephen, we may not directly find an answer, but will we learn how to live and how to deal with the idea of our human mortality and the possibility of an afterlife. After all, learning to how to truly live is more important than learning how to accept death.
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