Telemachus cont.
I forgot to mention. I find it keen how Joyce placed these two characters around Steven; Mulligan and Haines. Steven, I cannot help but assume is Joyce’s alter ego. Steven and Joyce concern themselves with Ireland, and the voice of Ireland, like Yeats. Why else would Steven play such a master of rhetoric, and have such an incredible sense of the Irish identity (needless to say the remark about the cracked looking glass). But back to Mulligan and Haines, I would like to imagine Mulligan and Haines as personifying to polarized citizens of Ireland. Mulligan being the cliché Irish “good ol’ boy”, social, funny, and whitty. Remarks like “O damn you and your Paris fads” and “…Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty” reassure the quintessential Irishness. On the other hand, Haines represents the other end, the invader, the religious, and the materialistic. He is a British man and wants to make a book of Stevens’s sayings, but also he wants to take away from Steven what he has. When Steven asks him about money, it is all too convenient that the conversation ends. Steven becomes aware later on, as Haines brings back up the collection of Stevens’s work, that Haines has an expensive and flashy cigarette case and lighter. “A smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone… from his waist coat a nickel tinder box.” In this chapter, these two characters give us a vision of what both Steven and Ireland are up against.