The Black-And-White Portrait of Stephen's Upbringing

As we are raised in this world, we’re introduced to this idea of right and wrong, and with our
premature brains, it can get easy to see everything in black-and-white: you’re either all right or all wrong.
This is definitely easier than exploring gray areas of logic, which can be often uncomfortable,
especially in more mature cases. Let’s say for example, you have that one family member who everyone
looks up to, and who everyone thinks is the spitting image of perfection. Then, that person does
something “wrong” - hits another car, makes an offensive joke, lies about something - and it can be
difficult to blur that once-perfect image that you had of that person. But you don’t want to see them as a
bad person, right? This is an especially conflicted topic in the context of religion. While more progressive
theologians argue that we're all people and we should be forgiven for our sins, particularly our minor
ones, more fundamentalists will likely argue that we should avoid all forms of sin at all costs.

This is a concept that Stephen struggles with throughout his upbringing. We see in the very beginning,
which maps out his first few years in bursts of memory, that he is very confused when he is punished for
something, until he realizes that it was “wrong”. As he is further influenced by the extreme views of his
mentor, Dante, and the priests at his all-boys’ school that he eventually attends, he becomes more wary
of the extreme sensitivity that his moral standing has to sin. This is especially heightened with his
upbringing in an extremely conservative "fire and brimstone" religious environment. He becomes
extremely fearful of sin and prevents himself from committing it at all cost, for fear of being punished (as
Dante gruesomely described with birds picking out his eyes) or even worse, being condemned to hell for
eternity. On one particular night, he hurries through his prayers with this belief that should the bell go off
before he is in bed, he will be certainly hell-bound; something as simple as not finishing his prayers in
time evokes fear for the young Stephen, again, likely due to the pressures of his "all right or all wrong"
society.

This becomes a great source of discomfort for him when he, as all kids eventually do, are forced to face
a grey-area situation. When he hears of the older boys getting in trouble, rather than wondering what will
happen to them, he wonders just how they could commit such a sin. It is news to him that people he
viewed as superior could somehow be in the wrong - which also appears with Parnell’s affair and the
tension it creates within his own family. His father and uncle - people he’s looked up to his whole life -
support Parnell in the midst of this blatant sin. It all hits a breaking point when he is unfairly "pandied" by
a prefect, someone who is supposed to be divinely superior but is clearly going against the natural
system of justice. I predict that Stephen will likely grapple with this concept of right and wrong as he
continues to mature throughout the novel.