Thus Stephen's portrait wins a great deal of sympathy from the reader. With eyeglasses that were broken on June 15, Stephen sees physical reality and the outer movements of life through a myopic opacity. His salary from Mr. Deasy is meager, and the tiresome headmaster uses his young instructor as a sounding board for his trite ideas. Stephen's concept of Shakespeare is treated with scorn in "Scylla and Charybdis," and he is not invited to the literary get-together to be held at the house of the writer George Moore on the evening of Bloomsday. He is patronized by George Russell (A. E.), who only reluctantly agrees to print Mr. Deasy's letter about foot and mouth disease (which Deasy had given Stephen) in his farmers' magazine. Stephen stumbles through Nighttown in an alcoholic daze, caused in part by his friends' giving him the disguised drinks; then, he meets his mother in a horrifying hallucination, is abandoned by his friend Lynch, and, when helpless, he is knocked down by the British soldier Carr. Even Bloom, despite all of his sympathy for Stephen, who he feels is wasting his talents among drifters and prostitutes, "uses" Stephen; Bloom thinks that perhaps Stephen can abet Bloom's imaginary concert tours — or teach Italian to Molly.
Yet, despite the pathos of his situation (which Joyce "controls" by undercutting it with many acerbic statements by Stephen), the ultimate picture of Stephen in Ulysses is heroic. Mulligan may be the sure doer, but Stephen is the sensitive thinker: Stephen dwells upon the implications of sin; Buck hides any possible guilt beneath blasphemies. Stephen did indeed suffer because of his mother's death: he "wept alone." Stephen is the complex Prince Hamlet; Mulligan is more a Rosencrantz than a true Horatio. Stephen, throughout Ulysses, is courageously pursuing the goal which he set for himself in A Portrait: to break free of society's nets — that is, to break free from all the forces which inhibit the growth of the soul and, by implication, the growth of the artist. For example, he refuses to join the national movement which was developing in Ireland in 1904: Political aspirations, as Stephen knows from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, lead only to dismal failure. Stephen feels that the Irish Renaissance is simply insular — a cultural suicide, through which Ireland will cut itself off from the wellsprings of European thought. Despite all of their posturings, Irishmen, to Stephen, are still bound to the double tyrants of Britain and Rome.
Stephen is going through a difficult period in Ulysses — but Joyce's tone is optimistic. We feel when we end the novel that Stephen will probably find solutions to his problems.
