Nestor

Chapter 2 is a crushing beginning. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we left Stephen on the precipice of a long and thrilling journey, following a long and tedious tour of his pubescence, warring for identity in the totalitarian enclaves of his Jesuit education, grasping at self-realization in the mythology of his own making, self-actualization in artistry as a vital, vindicating, and viable life path. Now, however, whatever appeared gained in Portrait seems lost in Ulysses—or, at least (at best), in limbo. We find Stephen stuck back where he began, circling the drain. What happened to the “wild heart of life”?
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” (28). It’s creepy, actually. Stephen’s instructing history; meanwhile, faced by representations of his own tortured school days, perpetually teasing out the echoes of his past.
Joyce sets “Nestor,” and all of Ulysses for that matter, where personal history, national history, and the history of Western Civilization intersect—in the ambiguity of the future’s possibilities.
In a way, I think this is the process by which Joyce is exercising himself of his own history, wiping out the manchild through the work of art as the cathartic process of becoming. Stephen touches upon ministering such self-creative possibilities in the triumphant (though apparently halting) epiphanic climax of Portrait.
Ireland creates itself in its national story as it tells that story to itself; as do we in ours.
Stephen’s like a whipped dog.


(If you've gotten this far, I apologize. I promise to try and make the next few a bit more cohesive.)