Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ulysses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging
Literature, Meaning, and Perspective
Love and Sex
Fate vs. Free Will
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy
Irish Identity and Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
Stephen Dedalus goes on a long soliloquy as he walks on Sandymount Strand, a Dublin beach, in the late morning. He begins by noting that people first see the signatures that changing objects leave behind—like their color and shape—rather than objects themselves. He closes his eyes and starts to navigate by hearing instead of seeing. Thinking of German philosophy, he realizes that people hear things one after the other (“Nacheinander”), in the same space but different points in time, but they see things one next to the other (“Nebeneinander”), in the same time but different points in space. The rhythm of his walk reminds him of poetry, and then he decides to open his eyes.
In the Odyssey, Proteus is the god of the sea, who constantly changes form. The legendary Spartan king Menelaus struggled to stop Proteus and ask him questions, but when he succeeded, Proteus told Menelaus that Odysseus was stranded on Calypso’s island. (Menelaus then passed this information on to Telemachus.) In this episode, Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings constantly shift, much like Proteus, and he struggles to pin down what he really wants and believes. Notably, this episode is a mirror image of an important scene in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen also went on a monologue on Sandymount Strand. Thus far, Joyce has mostly written a conventional realist narrative while occasionally jumping into his characters’ stream of consciousness. In this episode, the stream of consciousness takes over, and the reader gets a relatively direct view of how Stephen views the world. In fact, at the beginning of the episode, Stephen is asking about exactly that: the nature of perception. He sees the world as a set of concepts, not necessarily as a physical realm of things. He hears things before he sees them, and he even doubts the reality of the information he gets through his senses. In short, for Stephen, ideas are more real than physical things, and the mind (or soul) is more real than the body.
Themes
Stephen sees two midwives descend from the street to the beach, and he imagines that one (Florence MacCabe) might have a stillborn fetus in her bag. He thinks of how the umbilical cord links a child to their mother’s omphalos (navel). He imagines all of humanity linked by umbilical cords, almost like a network of telephone wires, all the way back to Adam and Eve. He thinks of his own parents: his ghostly dead mother, as she appears in his dreams, and his distant father. By making Stephen, they fulfilled God’s will. In contrast to the teachings of the Roman theologian Arius—who died in a public toilet, Stephen notes—this suggests that the Father and the Son are really one and the same.
With the image of an umbilical cord telephone network, Stephen clearly links ancestry, identity, and communication. Namely, the navel marks people’s connection to their mothers (and, by extension, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on). Thus, all of humanity can be viewed as interconnected because of people’s common origins in their most distant ancestors. When viewing all people throughout history as members of the same giant web, history and art appear to reflect the spirit of humanity as a whole. At the same time, Stephen also feels like a mere individual, entirely cut off from his own family and beholden to no force except his own freedom. He wants to create art and history as a free individual, not as the latest product of a long bloodline. His question about whether the father and the son are one and the same therefore isn’t just a reference to Hamlet, the Bible, and his own conflicts with his father: it’s also a question about human freedom, or people’s ability to deviate from (or transcend) the plan that their ancestors (or God) has set out for them. Of course, it’s also significant that Stephen theorizes about ancestry in terms of matrilineal descent (through the mother’s line—or umbilical cord—and not the father’s bloodline). This worldview ties naturally into his own love for his mother and his disdain for his neglectful father, whom he views as irrelevant to his own identity.
Themes
The wind blows and the waves crash onto the shore. Stephen remembers that he must deliver Mr. Deasy’s letter and meet Buck Mulligan at the pub at 12:30. He ponders moving in with his aunt Sara. He imagines his father’s voice mocking her family and daydreams about paying her a visit. Stephen’s cousin Walter would let him in, and he would drink with his eccentric, bedridden uncle Richie Goulding, who would sing along to his favorite opera aria, from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Stephen concludes that his and Sara’s homes are both “houses of decay.”
Suddenly, the sounds of the world draw Stephen’s attention away from his innermost thoughts. He turns back to the practical question that underlies all his morning philosophizing: where is he going to sleep tonight? Of course, this is also a question about home, belonging, and identity: does Stephen belong with his family, or can he forge his own path yet again? His uncle Richie’s favorite Verdi aria is actually a song about a feuding family falling into decay, and this appears to give Stephen his answer: he has to fend for himself.
Themes
Stephen decides that he can’t find the “beauty” he’s looking for with his family, nor in his studies, nor his intellectual friendships with people like Buck Mulligan. But he also thinks he’s wrong to turn away from the world, like all the priests conducting their empty rituals. He remembers the naïve sins of his childhood: his blind religious devotion, his sexual awakening, and his arrogant aspiration to write classic books that scholars would admire for generations.
Stephen views his alienation as related to his genius: he feels that his artistic commitment to finding beauty and truth prevents him from connecting with other people, who have lesser goals and concerns in life. Therefore, he does not belong in any of the places or communities he visits. At the same time, he fears becoming like the priests, who share his sense of a higher calling but end up giving up on action in the real world in order to fulfill it. While he recognizes that his ambition is overly grandiose and self-centered—and that he has learned much even in the short years since his childhood—he feels that he cannot give up his quest for beauty while staying true to himself.
Themes
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Stephen trudges down the polluted wet sand, noticing the trash all around him, and realizes he’s already passed the turn to Sara’s house. He turns towards the Pigeon House power plant, remembers a line about pigeons from a French novel, and starts thinking about his time in Paris. He remembers chatting with the Irish expats Kevin and Patrice Egan, failing out of medical school, eating cheap food, and dressing like a bohemian artist. One day, he went to the post office to receive money from his parents, but instead received a telegram saying that his mother was dying.
While Stephen hopes to capture the purity of absolute beauty through his art, he’s actually surrounded by filth and trash in Dublin. This is an apt metaphor for his unfortunate fate: he feels that he cannot achieve his potential as an artist because of the unfavorable historical, social, religious, and economic conditions he has to live in. In contrast, his time in Paris now represents his brief taste of personal, artistic, and political freedom.
Themes
Stephen looks out at the seawall made of boulders and notes how the sun strikes them and the sea. This reminds him of the morning sunlight in Paris, which makes him think of the city’s pastries and adulterers. Stephen remembers drinking after dinner with Kevin Egan, who gossiped about the news and tried to get him to join the revolutionary cause. Otherwise, Kevin was poor and forgotten, although Stephen tried to help out his son Patrice by teaching him to sing.
Stephen pities old Kevin Egan for his loneliness and irrelevance, but he is also frightened of turning out like him. After all, he already feels isolated and unappreciated as a young man. Kevin’s fate is proof of how the world abuses people who dedicate their lives to causes and ideas—meaning artists, in Stephen’s mind.
Themes
Stephen approaches the shore and looks down towards the Martello tower, where he’s decided not to return at night. He feels exiled, like Hamlet. Next, he sits on a rock and notices a dog’s carcass and wrecked boat laying next to each other in a bed of seaweed, then he notices another dog running across the beach and briefly worries it will attack him, until it runs away. Stephen thinks of how the Vikings invaded this coastline and a pod of whales once conveniently beached itself there during a famine. Buck Mulligan even saved a man from drowning on this beach, but Stephen is a coward afraid of a barking dog. He honestly doesn’t think he would have been able to save the drowning man, although maybe he would have tried.
Literature and history fundamentally inform Stephen’s view of the world: when he looks out at the sea, he sees Shakespeare and Viking invaders. And yet he’s dismayed to see that this real life doesn’t add up to the standards of either history or literature—in other words, he realizes that he’s not a conventional hero, despite his lofty ambitions. Meanwhile, Buck Mulligan’s reputation as a hero is ironic, because he totally lacks any sense of morality or integrity. In contrast, Stephen has dedicated himself to these values, yet he has completely failed to achieve all of his ambitions. Kind of like Mr. Deasy, Buck serves to expose how unfairly fate has treated Stephen.
Themes
The dog runs around the beach, chasing seagulls and barking at the waves, scaring people off and sniffing at the dead dog’s carcass. The dog’s owner, who is collecting cockles along with a woman, calls it over and gives it a kick. Then, it pees on some rocks and digs in the sand for something—perhaps its grandmother. Stephen struggles to remember his dream from the night before, in which he met a man resembling the Persian king Haroun in a “street of harlots.”
With its athletic jaunts around the beach, even the dog seems to Stephen to be mocking his passivity and indecision. Its digging reminds Stephen of the riddle he invented for his class in the last episode, which was really an expression of his own guilt about his mother’s death (“the fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush”). Finally, while his dream about king Haroun might seem random and out of place, it’s actually extremely significant because it foreshadows events at the end of the novel, when Stephen and Leopold Bloom meet at night.
Themes
Stephen looks at the cockle-pickers walking down the beach and starts fantasizing about the woman. They walk past and glance at Stephen, who starts composing poetry about them in his head. He rips a scrap off Mr. Deasy’s letter and starts writing, bent over and casting a shadow on the rocks. He wonders if anyone will see his shadow or read the words he’s writing. In his writing, he speculates about the nature of distance and describes a woman he saw on the street on Monday. He asks what he’s trying to do by writing about her and yearns for a woman’s touch, for “that word known to all men.”
After reaching for consistent meaning throughout the entire episode so far, Stephen has a flash of inspiration, and he finally shifts from detached thinking to genuine emotional engagement with the world. In this moment, he finally admits his own vulnerability and need for love (which is “that word known to all men”). He has mostly tried to ignore this topic during this episode so far by emphasizing his absolute faith in beauty and truth, as well as his distaste for other people. But here, Joyce reminds the reader that everyone wants to feel loved, even intellectuals like Stephen.
Themes
Stephen is done writing, so he shoves his pencil and paper into his pocket. He repeats the line, “And no more turn aside and brood,” from Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?” But he starts to brood anyway: he laments having to wear Buck Mulligan’s secondhand boots and comments that their friendship is practically homoerotic. Then, in a paragraph full of suggestive onomatopoeias, he urinates into the rocks. He remembers the man who drowned off the coast and thinks about how the man’s flesh will become part of the food chain and transform into fish, geese, and mountains—just as he breathes the same air and steps on the same dust as people from the past.
In Joyce’s writing, even Stephen peeing on the beach has deep significance as a symbolic, creative act: he is contributing to the same cycle of life that he describes in the rest of this passage. His meditations on the interconnectedness of life show that he has at least temporarily overcome his sense of separation from the world and alienation from other living things. He reaffirms that his art cannot spring entirely from his own individuality, but must involve him reaching out and engaging with the world around him. This cycle of life also hints at the concept of transubstantiation in the Catholic eucharist, as well as Jesus’s transmutation and resurrection. (In the next episode, Leopold Bloom puts a new twist on it when he tells Molly about “metempsychosis.”) In short, the cycle of life points to the potential for salvation through an act of creation, which is really just a transformation of things that already exist. This is the solution to Stephen’s dilemma between freedom and obedience, or artistic truth and the world around him.
Themes
Stephen thinks about the clouds, his thirst, the evening, and then his rotting teeth, which lead him to contemplate visiting a dentist. He reaches for his handkerchief, but realizes he doesn’t have it, so he picks his nose and wipes his snot on the rock, then walks off. He feels like there’s someone behind him, watching; when he turns around, he sees a giant ship, with its three masts poking up against the horizon like crosses.
Stephen lent his handkerchief to Buck at the beginning of the first episode, which is why he doesn’t have it here. Similarly, Stephen’s rotting teeth contrast with Buck’s gold-tipped teeth, and they relate to all the other decaying objects in this episode (like houses, trash, and the dog’s corpse) that are associated with Stephen. The introductory portion of the book dealing with Stephen ends here, with Stephen feeling that someone is behind him. This feeling foreshadows his later encounters with Bloom and the ship represents a promise of salvation on the horizon.
Themes
