Telemachus
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…”
Stephen Dedalus opens the day in a seaside tower, mocked by his roommate Buck Mulligan and unsettled by the recent death of his mother. He decides not to return that night.
- Beat 01On the roof
Buck Mulligan shaves on the gun-platform of the Martello Tower and mock-celebrates a Mass with his shaving bowl, dragging the half-mourning Stephen into the joke.
- Beat 02Mulligan and Stephen
They argue, mildly, about Stephen's refusal to kneel at his dying mother's bedside. Mulligan calls Stephen 'dogsbody' and 'jejune Jesuit'; Stephen takes the wound and files it away.
- Beat 03Breakfast with Haines
Their English guest Haines comes down. They eat, the milkwoman arrives, and Stephen watches her as a stooped, foreign emblem of an Ireland being sold cheap.
- Beat 04Down to the bay
The three walk to the Forty Foot for a swim. Mulligan dives in; Stephen, dry on the rocks, hands over the tower key and decides, silently, that he will not be coming back tonight. The chapter ends on the word 'Usurper.'
Eight in the morning on 16 June 1904, in a stone gun-tower on the coast just south of Dublin. Stephen Dedalus is twenty-two, fresh back from a failed stab at being a writer in Paris, and still raw from his mother's death — she asked him on her deathbed to pray for her and he, having lost his faith, refused. He's now sharing the tower with Buck Mulligan, a charismatic medical student who is everything Stephen isn't (loud, confident, untroubled, popular), and Haines, a posh English visitor who collects Irish folklore the way other tourists collect souvenirs. Over breakfast Mulligan needles Stephen about his black mourning clothes, his mother, his pretentiousness; an old milkwoman comes to the door and Stephen sees in her a kind of shrunken symbol of Ireland — poor, deferential, more impressed by the Englishman and the doctor than by her own son the poet. Underneath the banter the chapter is about three kinds of occupation: the English occupy Ireland, the Church occupies Stephen's conscience, and Mulligan is quietly occupying his home. By the end Stephen hands over the key, walks off to work, and silently decides he isn't coming back. He is choosing exile inside his own city — a young man cutting himself loose from country, religion and friendship in the same morning, with nothing yet to replace them.
- Scene
- The Tower
- Hour
- 8:00 AM
- Organ
- —
- Art
- Theology
- Color
- White, gold
- Symbol
- Heir
- Technic
- Narrative (young)
- Correspondence
- Telemachus