A Wilderness of Mirrors: Modernist Mimesis in Joyce's Portrait and Beckett's Murphy

James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Samuel Beckett's Murphy have each received a fair share of critical attention, but the possibility of any revealing relation between them seems to have remained till now largely unaddressed. Even Barbara Reich Gluck, in Beckett and Joyce, tends to stress the influence of Joyce's later works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, on his sometime apprentice, amanuensis, and friend. l Yet the first novels of the two major Irish prose stylists of the twentieth century, Portrait and Murphy, may well provide a more intriguing basis for comparison