This Walk Has No Direction

A young man on a beach at eleven in the morning, with nowhere he has to be. Episode three of James Joyce's Ulysses, Proteus, is the one that stops most first readers cold, and Philip Kitcher's way through it is to watch where Stephen Dedalus's feet take him and ask why. Stephen has tried being a priest, a scholar, a saint and a poet, and has his own verdict on each. Kitcher follows him from that reckoning to a scene on the rocks he reads more candidly than most, and on to a ship that has what Stephen does not. What is the word Stephen cannot find?