Befitting the linear development of the bildungsroman genre, A Portrait is replete with many child-characteristic puzzles and rhetorical questions, especially in the beginning two parts of the novel, concerning the protagonist’s identity in the family, school, society, and, ultimately, the universe. These many puzzles and questions quickly tie in with other prominent features in the narration—i.e. the blatant repetition of some key words or phrases, such as “difference,” “over and over,”  “Again!” and “On!” and distinctly repetitive methods of narration. Puzzles and questions and tentative answers in repetitions, thus, manifest a pattern of a
dialectic ceaselessly at work in the novel—that between being and difference. More often than not, despite intentional repetitions of the same events are maneuvered with a view to replicating the self-same truthfulness of being, disturbing variations or differences inevitably arise to forestall that. My paper will argue that in insisting on playing out the differential patterns of his thoughts and ideas, Stephen has found a strategy to “forge” (in its double senses of creating and fabricating) his new art.