In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen was treated with both irony and sympathy. Joyce admired his young protagonist's battle against orthodoxy, but he also found Stephen's intolerant cynicism a bit pompous. In Book Five of A Portrait, Stephen became a mock Christ figure, preaching his gospel of aesthetics to bored and sometimes gibing apostles. In Ulysses, Stephen is a more human figure than he appeared to be at the end of the earlier novel. He has returned from Paris, his destination at the end of A Portrait, having been summoned home by word of his mother' s incipient death from cancer; now he finds himself emotionally drowning as surely as his mother literally drowned in her own green bile. In Ulysses, he sees himself as an Icarus-like figure, one who flew too high and burned his wings in the sun; as "Daedalus," he parallels himself with the archetypal flying ace.
In Ulysses, Stephen is beset with many problems, some of them stemming from his emotional distance from those around him, whom he cannot accept. Although he lives in the Martello Tower with Haines, the Oxonian, and with Buck Mulligan, a Dublin medical student, he knows that he cannot remain in this habitat: Haines has bizarre nightmares that keep Stephen awake, and Mulligan, with his coarse and brutal treatment of Stephen, has "usurped" Stephen's place in the Tower. At the end of "Telemachus," he meekly surrenders the Tower's key to Mulligan and begins to walk his own path. Compared to the physical Mulligan, Stephen feels himself to be inept and weak. Stephen is afraid of water (symbolically, baptism), while Mulligan plunges into life. In many ways, Stephen is physically withdrawn, fearing dogs and thunder, while Mulligan once saved a man from drowning. The facile Mulligan can handle the visiting milk woman in "Telemachus," although he looks down upon her, while Stephen sits brooding upon the lost past of Ireland. Stephen's estrangement is also seen in his teaching at Mr. Deasy's school, where he does not seem to care, really, that his students are inattentive and obstreperous.
