Ulysses

Ulysses

by

James Joyce

Stephen Dedalus is the novel’s secondary protagonist and the main character in the first three episodes. He is a twenty-two-year-old aspiring writer who struggles to find a sense of identity and direction in colonized Dublin under the rule of England. Stephen is incredibly sensitive and at times narcissistic, but only because he believes that the artist’s quest for truth must come before everything else. He spends much of the novel in inward contemplation, both because of his intellectual curiosity and because he broke his glasses the day before and can’t see anything. Stephen essentially represents James Joyce in his early twenties—in fact, he was also the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which focused on his upbringing and artistic awakening. Stephen left Ireland for Paris at the end of A Portrait, but in Ulysses, the reader learns that he abandoned his studies, then had to return to Ireland upon learning that his mother was terminally ill with cancer. Having firmly given up his Catholic faith, Stephen refused to pray at his mother’s deathbed, but he continues to feel an overwhelming sense of guilt about this during Ulysses. Meanwhile, Stephen has essentially disowned his father, the irresponsible alcoholic Simon Dedalus, and he explores these feelings in part by developing elaborate theories about fatherhood and betrayal (including one about Shakespeare’s Hamlet). In his quest for a father, he represents Telemachus from The Odyssey. In short, Stephen feels completely alienated from the people around him and yearns to find a sense of companionship and love, but he thinks that he can’t do so without compromising his intellectual or artistic values. Moreover, he is struggling to make ends meet because he is a literal starving artist: he doesn’t eat all day on June 16, and he owes far more than he could possibly pay back from his job teaching at Mr. Deasy’s school. (He also blows most of his salary on beer and prostitutes on the same day he gets paid.) In addition, Stephen doesn’t have a place to stay: he has been sharing a Martello tower with Buck Mulligan and Haines, but at the beginning of the novel, he realizes that he cannot stand them any longer, so he decides to move out. When they meet at the end of the novel, Leopold Bloom offers to give Stephen the family, stability, and home he needs—but Stephen rebuffs him and wanders off into the night instead.

Stephen Dedalus Quotes in Ulysses

The Ulysses quotes below are all either spoken by Stephen Dedalus or refer to Stephen Dedalus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging Theme Icon
).
Episode 1: Telemachus Quotes

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Related Characters: Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan (speaker), Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus, Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Haines, Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan
Related Symbols: Keys
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 2: Nestor Quotes

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Garrett Deasy (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 3: Proteus Quotes

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker)
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Florence MacCabe
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Leopold Bloom
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis Quotes

—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

Related Characters: John Eglinton (William Magee) (speaker), Stephen Dedalus, Richard Best, William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:

—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Richard Best, John Eglinton (William Magee), William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 159-160
Explanation and Analysis:

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Richard Best, John Eglinton (William Magee), William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 170-171
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 14: Oxen of the Sun Quotes

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. […] Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Frank (“Punch”) Costello, Matt Lenehan, Vincent Lynch, William Madden
Page Number: 323-324
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 15: Circe Quotes

STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (he frowns) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which …
THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t.
STEPHEN: (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP: Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN: (abruptly) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Vincent Lynch (speaker), Leopold Bloom, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 411-412
Explanation and Analysis:

STEPHEN: (eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus
Page Number: 474
Explanation and Analysis:

STEPHEN: Non serviam!
[…]
(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus
Related Symbols: Ashplant
Page Number: 475
Explanation and Analysis:

(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom (speaker), Stephen Dedalus, Rudolf Bloom, Jr.
Page Number: 497
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 17: Ithaca Quotes

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 550
Explanation and Analysis:

What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.

What was Bloom’s visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.

What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?
Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.
Auditively, Bloom’s: The traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 565
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 18: Penelope Quotes

Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over

Related Characters: Marion (“Molly”) Bloom (speaker), Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 637-638
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Ulysses LitChart as a printable PDF.
Ulysses PDF

Stephen Dedalus Quotes in Ulysses

The Ulysses quotes below are all either spoken by Stephen Dedalus or refer to Stephen Dedalus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging Theme Icon
).
Episode 1: Telemachus Quotes

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Related Characters: Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan (speaker), Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus, Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Haines, Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan
Related Symbols: Keys
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 2: Nestor Quotes

—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Garrett Deasy (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 3: Proteus Quotes

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker)
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Florence MacCabe
Page Number: 31-32
Explanation and Analysis:

After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Leopold Bloom
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 9: Scylla and Charybdis Quotes

—Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

Related Characters: John Eglinton (William Magee) (speaker), Stephen Dedalus, Richard Best, William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 152
Explanation and Analysis:

—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Richard Best, John Eglinton (William Magee), William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 159-160
Explanation and Analysis:

Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Richard Best, John Eglinton (William Magee), William Lyster, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 170-171
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 14: Oxen of the Sun Quotes

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. […] Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Frank (“Punch”) Costello, Matt Lenehan, Vincent Lynch, William Madden
Page Number: 323-324
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 15: Circe Quotes

STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (he frowns) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which …
THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t.
STEPHEN: (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP: Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN: (abruptly) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), Vincent Lynch (speaker), Leopold Bloom, William Shakespeare
Page Number: 411-412
Explanation and Analysis:

STEPHEN: (eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus
Page Number: 474
Explanation and Analysis:

STEPHEN: Non serviam!
[…]
(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

Related Characters: Stephen Dedalus (speaker), May Goulding Dedalus
Related Symbols: Ashplant
Page Number: 475
Explanation and Analysis:

(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom (speaker), Stephen Dedalus, Rudolf Bloom, Jr.
Page Number: 497
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 17: Ithaca Quotes

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 550
Explanation and Analysis:

What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.

What was Bloom’s visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.

What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?
Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.
Auditively, Bloom’s: The traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.

Related Characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 565
Explanation and Analysis:
Episode 18: Penelope Quotes

Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over

Related Characters: Marion (“Molly”) Bloom (speaker), Stephen Dedalus
Page Number: 637-638
Explanation and Analysis: