Stately, Plump

Eight in the morning on top of a tower by the sea, and a medical student with a shaving bowl is saying Mass. Philip Kitcher opens the first chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, with a question about its first sentence that most readers never think to ask: whose words are these? The answer carries him through the morning, the joke about the dead mother, the apology that makes it worse, and the one thing Stephen Dedalus finally says he holds against his friend. He follows Stephen down to the swimming hole, where the chapter ends on a single word, and argues it does not mean what it seems to.