What is the Uncle Charles Principle?
The Uncle Charles Principle is the critic Hugh Kenner's name for Joyce's habit of letting narration pick up the vocabulary a character would use. It comes from a sentence in A Portrait of the Artist where Uncle Charles “repaired” to the outhouse, his own prim word, not the narrator's.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Several episodes. The narrator of Nausicaa, describing Gerty in words she would choose herself.
as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.
What it means in plain English
“Winsome Irish girlhood” is not how Joyce would write; it is how Gerty would like to be described. The narrator has caught her language, like a cold.
Kenner showed that the same thing happens on a smaller scale in almost every episode.
Literary context
Kenner introduced the term in Joyce's Voices (1978).
References
- Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (1978)
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Chapter 2
- Ulysses, Episode 13, “Nausicaa”
Continue in the Reading Room
Questions readers ask
Who coined the term?
The critic Hugh Kenner.
Related terms
Free indirect discourse
Free indirect discourse is narration in the third person (“he”, “she”) that takes on a character's own words and attitudes, without “he thought”. Ulysses uses it constantly. The first half of Nausicaa is the best example: the narrator speaks in Gerty MacDowell's romantic-magazine voice.
Gerty MacDowell
Gerty MacDowell is the young woman Bloom watches on Sandymount Strand at sunset in Episode 13. The first half of the episode is told in the gushing style of the romantic magazines she reads. She leans back to show her legs; Bloom masturbates; then she limps away.
Interior monologue
The technique of rendering a character's unspoken thoughts directly on the page, as they actually occur. The engine of the book's style.