James Joyce's Ulysses Chapter Three

Summary of James Joyce’s Ulysses Chapter Three Stephen Dedalus goes for a walk. That’s it. That’s all. From a plot perspective, that sums chapter three of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Plot is not the point of the novel, however. Joyce explores, rather, the internal life of each character, his mental responses to the sensory input received during the daily tasks completed in the course of everyday life. In this chapter, the author gives the reader a primer by which to navigate the rest of Ulysses. While the waters of chapters one and two seem to be choppy with abrupt transitions between internal dialogue, external dialogue and third-person narration, chapter three is the equivalent of being knocked over and pulled under by a tidal wave. In those …show more content…
He is not aware of this any more than we are when 'spacing off,' letting those whom author, Stephen King, always refers to as “the guys in the basement,” do the heavy lifting. Joyce is attempting to put to paper the multi-layered thoughts and perceptions of a person in real time. Limited to the linearity inherent in language, Joyce cannot illustrate the simultaneity of our thought processes. He alerts us to his own frustration with this at the beginning of the chapter by having Stephen ponder nacheinander-consecutiveness, and nebeneinander-concurrentness (37). It cannot be done, of course, but the beauty lies in the fact that he dares attempt it. There is no shame in …show more content…
Stephen’s thoughts then go to all the airs he put on during that trip, all the pretensions he assumed, all the writing he did not do, and is ashamed for having accomplished nothing-all on his mother’s dime while she lay dying. He remembers Kevin Egan rehashing his glory days, pretending to still be what he no longer is, and recognizes himself as a twisted version of Egan: Stephen pretends to be what he never was in the first place, above 'regular