While reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, it wasn’t the everyday, mundane, and tedious aspects of Stephen’s life that caught my attention, but the outside myths and stories that surround Stephen’s life. As a young boy, he didn’t just imagine himself in these mythical beings, but used art as a way to reinvent himself to escape his insecure boyhood. At first, his last name, Dedalus, which is linked to an ancient Greek figure, almost serves as a heavy burden over his head. As a young boy, his last name stood as a reminder of something he could become or grow into as he ages, but at the moment, he’s borrowing the art from these figures and is not able to create art himself. He wants to be like Daedalus, the brilliant inventor who created wings for his son, but right now he’s still in the process of building his own artistic identity, and we as the readers, do not know what form that will take. I love how distant stories aren’t so distant to this character; instead, they serve as a script for what he can become.