The character of Hamlet is like a philosopher searching for the meaning of his own existence .Yet this search is complicated by the unusual tangle of his family life—royalty, murder revenge and maternal dishonesty. In one of his first soliloquy the disillusion of his mother’s ‘stained’ action makes Hamlet question the value of his own life;
‘How weary,stale flat and unprofitable
Seems to me all the uses of the world’
We are locked up inside Stephen Dedalus' head from the start. From the very first lines evoking Stephen's consciousness as 'baby tuckoo', we see him through his own sensations as he develops into manhood before he departs Ireland for Europe. The nature of the artist's vocation becomes the central theme of 'A Portrait'. It frames the conflict in Stephen's mind between two opposing forces –the power of his environment and the authority of the church, school and family on the one hand, pitted against his own consciousness of a growing powerful individuality which he must affirm at all cost. In rejecting the demands of home, fatherland and church, Stephen takes up this task of expressing himself freely as an artist. Furthermore he is utterly lonely from the early days at Clongowes College to his last weeks at the university. He is in psychological terms an 'isolate' and so far from playing any part in the life of his country, his only recourse can be exile;
Read more: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man----James Joyce
Adorno in his twenties studied with Berg,directed the radical Viennese music periodical"Anbruch" thus believing that the best modern music fulfils the needs of our time. He points out that this is achieved through the music' problematic nature, its obscurity, its social isolation and since being a Marxist himself, music' relationship is essentially dialectical with society. This relationship is complex, at times contradictory and is marked by antithesis as well as agreement.