Stephen's Hamlet Theory

After the ease of Leopold Bloom's head, Philip Kitcher warns, we are back to Stephen Dedalus. In "Scylla and Charybdis" Stephen is in the National Library, where he was not supposed to be: he had promised to meet Mulligan and Haines in the pub and explain his theory about Hamlet, in hopes that Haines would pay for it. Instead he presents it to the Irish literati of the day, among them George Russell, known as AE, who gets up and leaves early in the exposition.

Kitcher explains why the chapter is hard going. Stephen's head is full of esoteric Elizabethan knowledge and language, so parts of the episode read as if they came out of the late sixteenth century, and the theory itself is full of tensions and contradictions, perhaps because Stephen has already been drinking with the newspapermen. Along the way Kitcher picks out the one beautiful sentence Joyce gives Stephen, the five vowels he thinks at the man he owes a pound.

Halfway through, Mulligan shows up, and Stephen's thought is "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?" The presentation is a flop. Mulligan is praised and invited to George Moore's soiree that evening; Stephen is not, and learns he has been left out of an anthology of young Irish poets. He exits behind Mulligan, a servant of a servant, passing close by Bloom, who has been lurking in the library the whole time.