Abstract:The order of the five senses in the third chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is different from that in the opening of the novel to express some new symbolic meanings The differences serve as foils to the linear form of Stephen’s physical growth and the spiral pattern of his mental development The change of Stephen’s ideology is revealed in the course of his religious retreat The means of the description of the religious retreat can trace to the Bible, so they can be regarded as the reappearance of the ancient descriptive mode By virtue of the symbolic techniques, Joyce succeeds in showing his solicitude for rationality and expressing a growing youth’s attempt to find the way out