Episode 2 of Ulysses transforms Homer's wise old king into a meditation on memory, power, nationalism, money and the burden of inherited ideas.
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Joyce names Episode 2 after Nestor, the oldest of Homer's kings — the figure who, in the Odyssey, embodies memory, counsel and the continuity of generations. Telemachus visits him for news of his missing father, and Nestor responds with hospitality and long, looping recollections of the Trojan War.
Joyce reimagines that role in Mr Deasy, the headmaster of a small Dalkey school where Stephen Dedalus reluctantly teaches. Unlike Homer's noble elder, Deasy is narrow, prejudiced, and trapped in outdated thinking. The Homeric scene survives — old man, young man, the room of instruction — but its moral centre has rotted.
Joyce transforms heroic wisdom into the exhausted rhetoric of modern history.
In Book 3 of the Odyssey, Telemachus sails from Ithaca to Pylos in search of his father. He is welcomed by Nestor — the oldest of the surviving Greek kings — who pours libations, offers hospitality, and shares his memories of the years after Troy.
Nestor speaks of Agamemnon's terrible homecoming, of Menelaus's long wanderings, and of Odysseus's silence. He cannot give Telemachus the news he wants, but he gives him something else: an inheritance of memory, and the courage to keep looking.
The episode is about transmission. Knowledge passes from elder to younger; the past is poured, like wine, from one generation into the next. It is the calm before the long search begins in earnest.
Nestor is the noble old counsellor who welcomes Telemachus and pours out memory and advice. Joyce's Deasy occupies the same chair — the elder lecturing the young man — but his wisdom has soured into prejudice. He hectors Stephen about money, the English crown, and 'the jews', mistaking opinion for insight.
Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the jews.
Joyce's Homeric parallels operate symbolically and psychologically rather than through direct one-to-one equivalence.
| Ulysses | Odyssey counterpart | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Stephen Dedalus | Telemachus | Searching intellectual son |
| Mr Deasy | Nestor | Elder authority figure |
| The schoolboys | Young princes of Pylos | The next generation, half-listening |
| Deasy's school | Pylos | Place of instruction and inherited order |
| Stephen's history lesson | Nestor's oral recollections | Transmission of cultural memory |
| Deasy's coins | The feast at Pylos | Hospitality reduced to transaction |
Scene: the school. Art: history. Symbol: the horse.
Scene: school. Organ: none. Technique: catechism (personal).
Nestor → Deasy. Pisistratus → Sargent. Helen → Mrs O'Shea (alluded).
The chapter's keyword — a nightmare for Stephen, a textbook for Deasy.
Homeric oral memory becomes Dublin's stale recitation of dates.
Who has the right to instruct? Joyce questions every elder in the room.
Ireland under empire shadows every confident sentence Deasy speaks.
Deasy's prejudice exposes how 'wisdom' can carry poison forward.
Hospitality becomes wages; relationships become accounts.
The young decline to inherit the world the old hand down.
The schoolroom is where ideology is quietly transmitted.
Joyce's lifelong Dublin diagnosis: a city that cannot move.
Heroic counsel hardens into the rhetoric of a headmaster.
"Then the Gerenian horseman Nestor answered him: 'Dear child, since indeed you bring back to my mind the sorrow we endured in that country…'"
Odyssey, Book III (public domain trans.)
"— The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God."
Ulysses, Episode 2
Nestor's memory is personal, grief-stained, particular. Deasy's 'history' is abstract, providential and politically convenient. Joyce sets them side by side to expose what modern authority has lost.
"Sleep, son of Atreus; it does not befit a counsellor to sleep all night through…"
Odyssey, Book III
"— History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Ulysses, Episode 2
Where the Homeric elder is wakeful and watchful, Stephen reframes wakefulness itself as a desperate escape from the dream of the past.
"Strangers, who are you? From where do you sail the watery ways?"
Odyssey, Book III — the welcome at Pylos
"Mr Deasy took the coins from the drawer one by one… Two, he said. Two and twelve. Mark you, Mr Dedalus."
Ulysses, Episode 2
The Homeric welcome is a question; Deasy's welcome is a sum. Hospitality becomes accountancy.
Nestor's storytelling assumes a coherent world: gods watch, deeds matter, memory carries forward. The young man listens because the old man has something to give.
Deasy's confidence is ideological, not earned. Stephen receives wages and a letter and walks out into a city where no single voice can speak for the whole.
Joyce preserves the structure of epic while exposing the instability of modern identity and authority.
"Nestor" deepens the father–son theme introduced in "Telemachus". Stephen has left the tower; now he leaves the schoolroom too. Each refusal narrows his world but clarifies his stance: he will not inherit on Deasy's terms.
History itself becomes one of the novel's central antagonists. Joyce critiques nationalism, empire, anti-Semitism and the cultural paralysis of Edwardian Dublin — and he does so without ever stepping outside a single small classroom.
In Joyce's Dublin, wisdom survives — but often in damaged or distorted forms.
Joyce built Ulysses on a Homeric scaffolding, and Episode 2 corresponds to the Telemachus-at-Pylos scene in Book 3 of the Odyssey. Joyce calls the chapter 'Nestor' because Mr Deasy, the headmaster who lectures Stephen on history and money, ironically occupies the role of Homer's wise elder.