In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," how does Joyce show Stephen's ascent into a more artistic view of the world in the last chapter?

As we
reach the final chapter of "," Stephen is becoming more and more detached from his
friends, his family, and his fellow students. He's retreating ever more deeply into an
aestheticized fantasy world which he believes to be the necessary condition of his becoming an
artist. That world is now more palpably real than the mundane existence at home and at college
that he's forced to endure on a daily basis.

As Stephen sits on the steps of
the university he watches a flock of birds circling overhead. Stephen struggles to identify the
birds, but being as how his aestheticized existence is so much more real to him than the world
of fact, that doesn't much matter. What does matter is his instinctive grasp of the significance
of the flock of birds as a symbol of freedom. Like the birds overhead Stephen, too, wants to
soar; he...