Nestor

In the Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Pylos, the kingdom of Nestor, to see if Nestor has any news of his lost father. Nestor shows the young man great hospitality, but he has no information for him. Nestor tells Telemachus of the death of his father's comrade-at-arms Agamemnon at the hands of his disloyal wife's lover, and he suggests that Telemachus go to see king Menelaus.

In Ulysses we find Stephen teaching history to schoolchildren, after which he goes to the office of the schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, to get paid. Though not unkind, Mr. Deasy is not likely to be seen as a role model or wise adviser by Stephen, as he is a Protestant loyal to the British. He is also an anti-Semite, which Stephen is not.

The main concern of the episode is history. Stephen mulls over the subject in the abstract as he teaches, and on later hearing the children playing field hockey outside, their sounds become those of a raging battle in his imagination:

Shouts rang shrill from the boy's playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. [...] Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts.

Stephen also has an interesting interchange on the subject of history with Mr. Deasy. Stephen calls history "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." This remark is very much in keeping with Stephen's character; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not a tender childhood memoir of a young Irish laddie, as some insist on seeing it, but rather the story of Stephen's systematic ripping away of all that he sees as external artificialities—family, religion, social convention—so that he can free the artist within. He views Deasy's antisemitism as one more suffocating prejudice to be shaken off like a bad dream.

The conversation continues on:

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

—What? Mr Deasy asked.

—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

This last remark is open to interpretation, but to me it has two probable meanings, and perhaps is intended to encompass both. Stephen could be saying that history does not move toward "one great goal, the manifestation of God," because each ephemeral moment, each shout of a child, is already God's manifestation. Alternatively, if the cry of schoolchildren is meant to be taken as a symbol for strife and battle, then Stephen could be saying that history is not a progression to a goal but is instead the human conception of the necessary natural law of struggle, victory, and eternal change, and that with God's apparent sanction.

Other motifs within the chapter include coins as a symbol of history and power, the betrayal of leaders and of Ireland herself by those who should have been loyal, and that of a drowned man, a motif which continues from the first episode and which will be seen again several more times.

The episode ends with a beautiful if ironic image of the Protestant Mr. Deasy wearing history's mantle for the victor:

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.