Stephen Dedalus

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Stephen Dedalus was James Joyce's early pen name and the name of the main character of his early novel Stephen Hero. As a character in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Stephen seems to represent many facets of Joyce’s own life and personality. Stephen's first name comes from the first Christian martyr, and in a curious juxtaposition, his surname is a reference to the mythological figure Daedalus, who constructed a pair of wax wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escape from Crete, where he was imprisoned by King Minos (the man who contracted him to build a Labyrinth to contain a Minotaur). Some critics suggest that Stephen's surname both likens him to Daedalus and reflects the labyrinthine quality of Stephen's developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.