Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog "the atmosphere of schoolboy smut and practical jokes and poetry is evoked with lingering accuracy but with nothing more". Critic Jacob Korg later commented that "taken as a group, [the stories] seem to trace the child's emergence from his domain of imagination and secret pleasures into an adult world where he observes suffering, pathos, and dignity". The book has been described as showing Thomas' "waggish humor at its best, his exuberance & verbal magic in spectacular display". Apart from "Under Milk Wood", the book is "probably the most famous Dylan Thomas book published during his lifetime... certainly the most loved
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man narrative with free indirect speech, which allows both identification with and distance from Stephen. The narrator refrains from judgement. The omniscient narrator of the earlier "Stephen Hero" informs the reader as Stephen sets out to write "some pages of sorry verse," while "Portrait" gives only Stephen's attempts, leaving the evaluation to the reader. The novel is written primarily as a third-person narrative with minimal dialogue until the final chapter. This chapter includes dialogue-intensive scenes alternately involving Stephen, Davin and Cranly. An example of such a scene is the one in which Stephen posits his complex Thomist aesthetic theory in an