Who is Mr Deasy in Ulysses?
Garrett Deasy is the headmaster of the school in Dalkey where Stephen teaches in Episode 2. A pompous Ulster unionist, he pays Stephen his wages, lectures him on thrift, blames women and Jews for history's disasters, and asks him to place a letter about foot-and-mouth disease in the papers.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 2, Nestor. Mr Deasy, quoting Shakespeare's Iago to Stephen as a lesson in money.
I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life.
What it means in plain English
He tells Stephen he is proud to have “paid his way”. Stephen thinks of his debts to Mulligan and others.
When Deasy says history moves towards the manifestation of God, Stephen replies that history is a nightmare.
Literary context
Joyce taught briefly at a school in Dalkey in 1904; its headmaster was Francis Irwin.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 2, “Nestor”
- Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (revised edition, 1982)
Continue in the Reading Room
Questions readers ask
What is Deasy's letter about?
Foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. Stephen gets it into the Evening Telegraph.
Related terms
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" is spoken by Stephen Dedalus to Mr Deasy, the headmaster of the school where he teaches, in "Nestor" (Episode 2). Stephen means that the weight of the past, Irish, Catholic and personal, feels like a bad dream he cannot escape.
Stephen Dedalus
The young writer who opens the novel — brilliant, grieving, and adrift. Joyce's Telemachus, the searching son.
Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell led the Irish fight for Home Rule until 1890, when his affair with Katharine O'Shea was exposed and the Church and his party turned on him. He died in 1891. In Ulysses, he is everywhere: a lost leader, a betrayed man, and a symbol of Ireland's divisions.