Stephen and His Discontents

A dying woman asks her son to kneel and pray, and he will not. That refusal sits under the whole of the first episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, and Philip Kitcher reads it as the key to the young man in the tower, whose trouble is nearer home than any quest. He takes the Homeric title at its word and asks whether Stephen is looking for anybody at all, follows his discontents from Irish writing to the milk jug, and then rewrites a scrap of Joyce's dialogue twice, on purpose and badly, to show why the original had to be written the way it was.