SOURCE: Putzel, Steven. “Portraits of Paralysis: Stories by Joyce and Stephens.” Colby Library Quarterly 20, no. 4 (December 1984): 199–205.

In the following essay, Putzel compares the styles of James Joyce and Stephens, analyzing their use of character and character development.

When the names James Stephens and James Joyce are juxtaposed, we think of the elaborate fiction created by Joyce, playfully perpetuated by Stephens, and recorded in Joyce's Letters, Ellmann's biography of Joyce and in Stephens's post-World War II radio broadcasts for the BBC. In 1927, depressed by his continuing financial difficulties, his failing eyesight and the scathing responses of critics and friends to serial publication of his Work in Progress, Joyce convinced Harriet Shaw Weaver and himself that James Stephens might take over the writing of Finnegans Wake should he be unable to finish it. Over the years that followed Joyce transmuted the coincidental connaturality based on name, birthplace (Dublin) and birthdate...