A Shout in the Street

A history lesson at a school in Dalkey, and a teacher whose mind is somewhere else. In the second episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Nestor, Stephen Dedalus answers an old man's talk of providence with a shout from the playing field, and Philip Kitcher thinks that answer is the point of a chapter most readers skim. He takes the two sentences everyone quotes, the nightmare of history and the shout in the street, and asks what they argue about, and why it matters to a man who does not know where he is going. Then he turns to Mr. Deasy, and to the wise old Nestor Joyce named him after.