In the sixteenth fragment,
Buck Mulligan and
Haines are eating in a restaurant. Buck points to
John Howard Parnell, a bearded man looking at a chessboard. They order cakes and Buck jokes that Haines missed out on
Stephen’s theory of
Hamlet. Haines replies that only mentally unstable people obsess about
Shakespeare. (The narrative briefly returns to
the one-legged sailor begging for money.) Haines asks what delusion led
Stephen astray, and
Buck blames Catholic “visions of hell” for blocking him from experiencing “the joy of creation” and thereby ruining his art. Haines comments that this is strange, because there’s nothing of this idea in ancient Irish traditions. Buck jokes that it’ll take Stephen a decade to write anything. At the end of this fragment, the narrative returns to
Bloom’s religious pamphlet sailing down the
River Liffey.