Chapter 3: "Proteus" or "Thinking"

Post date: Apr 27, 2013 3:26:21 PM

Chapter 3

Banal Summary: Stephen goes for a walk on the beach and thinks of different things.

Quotes:

• "ineluctable modality of the visible" (56)

  • Reminds me of the closing lines of Portrait: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race". Oh, the joy of Joyce.

• "...world without end" (57)

• "Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath" (57):

  • This strange mixture of imagery conjures up the vision of Stephen's own birth, the birth of Abel, and the birth of mankind...there is a regret/disconnect and connection with one's parents--he is similar to them but wholly separate.

• "Houses of decay, mine, his and all" (60)

• "Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young...Hurray for the G-Ded idiot!" (61)

  • Sounds familiar...PS: Had to censor that one because this is my classroom website...haha.

• "...one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once..." (62).

  • Precisely. Exactly. This is why we read and what happens as we do, there is a connection, a consciousness, a quasi-mystical connection to the past and the existential realities of the ones who have come before us.

• "Who ever anywhere will read these written words?" (73)

  • Self-consciously written meta-fiction, Joyce ironically poses this question, breaking the "fourth wall," so to speak, and also in light of the difficulty of Ulysses sarcastically pokes fun at the fact that buried deep within chapter three, by far the most difficult chapter so far, we may not actually get to this deep circle of literary purgatory.

• "As I am. As I am. All or not at all." (74)

  • I see Billy Graham has been reading his Joyce...haha, not.

• "He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will" (76)

  • Booger. Hehe.

Word of the Day:

• ineluctable modality

Reflection:

This chapter was extremely difficult, arduous and cerebral. The latter adjective was certainly intentional and it characterizes the central point about the protagonist of Part I: Stephen Dedalus is a disembodied mind, floating around in a liberated consciousness that I find beautiful and annoying simultaneously. I am so pumped to move onto the earthy, embodied, fleshy Bloom. What do I take positively away from this chapter? That our minds, in their totality, when allowed to range freely are an infinite space of possibilities. It reminds me of two things: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and an image Dr. Joanna Pierce posted recently that stated: "I'm bored is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big universe that you've seen none percent of. Even the inside of your mind is Endless, it goes on forever, inwardly..." Someone's been reading their Joyce...