Stephen\u27s Strategy in Ulysses

At the beginning of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, who got back from Paris about a year ago to be present at his motherʼs deathbed, lives in the Martello tower with his friend Mulligan and Haines, an English friend of Mulliganʼs. Hainesʼs presence at the tower makes Stephen acutely aware of his subaltern position. Moreover, Stephen is tormented by the qualms of conscience because he refused to pray for his mother in spite of her earnest request. Due to this sense of guilt deriving from his past conduct, he is now conscious of his self being chained to the past. He feels himself deprived of freedom in these circumstances. It is quite natural, therefore, that he should want to get out of the present situation, and he is now beginning to think about how he can escape from both servitude and a sense of guilt. He tries to place himself in an ambiguous position in society by making his discourse equivocal and opaque. This strategy enables him to avoid the fixed role imposed by his masters. Mulligan and Deasy, the principal of the school where Stephen works as a part-time teacher, cannot understand what Stephen means by his enigmatic words, so they have great difficulty placing him in a fixed position in society. This small indirect rebellion of a servant against a master gives Stephen room for freedom. However, is it possible for him to get out of the past or history? Though he says to Deasy that he is trying to awaken from a nightmarish history, he is well aware of awakeningʼs great difficulty. Instead of freeing himself from a sense of guilt or indebtedness, which binds him to the past, he needs to make a productive use of it for the creation of his art. This paper attempts to explicate the meanings of Stephenʼs words and deeds in the first three episodes of Ulysses in terms of a struggle to be free from servitude and a sense of guilt