While Deasy coasts on naïve beliefs about life, history, and God, Stephen confronts the reality of the human condition: people pursue freedom by making significant decisions with uncertain outcomes in response to an unforgiving history. Many people around Stephen likely share Deasy’s worldview, which helps explain Stephen’s sense of alienation and despair. In his famous line about history, Stephen is referring to both his personal history and Ireland’s national history. He’s trying to overcome his family’s poverty, his mother’s death, and his failed move to Paris. Meanwhile, British colonialism in Irish history is responsible for Ireland’s political, economic, and creative marginalization in Europe. While Deasy’s faith in God leads him to think that the world will always get better and human effort is essentially irrelevant, Stephen sees this worldview as a naïve fantasy. Instead, Stephen thinks that humans are responsible for history—both making it and responding to it. Thus, history constrains him, and he hopes to improve history through art that breaks free of the past. When Stephen says that God is “a shout in the street,” his main point is that salvation is random and unpredictable, and not at all a certain outcome of a predetermined process.