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.