![]() ![]() His dazed journey to the infirmary and the talkative boy already in the other bed there become another set of events he has to accept. He’s ill, apparently having caught a chill after having been routinely shouldered into a flooded ditch the previous day. Neither, we suppose, does Stephen – until suddenly it’s morning and time to get up.Įxcept he can’t really get up. The description of the end-of-term farewells and the journey home are so vivid that we, as readers, don’t know whether the story really has been fast-forwarded eleven weeks. In bed it’s cold, then warm, so at least physical sensations are familiar. Will he have time to say his prayers – ‘God bless my father and my mother…’ – before the lights go out and he won’t have to risk going to Hell? This time – we are being taken through a single day and a night of Stephen’s school life – he makes it. ![]() The staff have their own hierarchies, like those in a seminary.Īnd any boundaries between rules of school life and the rules of Ireland’s Catholic religion are blurred. Stephen is proud always to come first or second in his class, and is mortified when York doesn’t win an off-the-cuff little test. Part of the model is its competitive nature. The teams in Stephen’s class are ‘York’ and ‘Lancaster’, as though Ireland has no history of its own. This is Clongowes in County Kildare, the same Jesuit school that Joyce attended, and it seems to be run on an English model. ‘Rody Kickham was a decent fellow but Nasty Roche was a stink.’ How long has he been there? (There are 76 days of the term left at the end of the section.) How old is he? About seven? His naïve trust in the ‘masters’ and the hierarchies of the other boys are all he has, alongside the routines he clings on to. He can hardly believe what his parents have done to him, counts off the days until Christmas with a nightly ritual of changing the number at his desk, and finds what refuge he can in the jargon of the place. The boy we learn to know as Stephen Dedalus (after half a page of ‘he’) has only very recently begun his first term at a boarding school. Then, after only a page and a half, we’re away into a new and alien world. Later, as he hides guiltily under the table, there’s something both sing-song and sinister about the little rhyme sung by a woman called Dante: ‘Pull out his eyes, / Apologise, / Apologise, / Pull out his eyes.’ Before the first main section begins we get an evocation of the world of the infant, and language to match: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow….’ Simple words, simple sensations of the heat and cold of a wet bed, the ‘queer smell’ of the replacement blanket. Three main sections, three separate episodes from the childhood of Stephen Dedalus. ![]()
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