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