Stephen is clearly alienated from Mulligan; he is also condemned to remain apart from Haines, whom he dislikes. Haines has been to a good school, Oxford; Joyce (if we read Ulysses autobiographically) resented the fact that he was forced to attend University College, Dublin, which he considered inferior to Trinity College (Dublin), which has reciprocity with Oxford and Cambridge. Haines has money; the Dedalus family lives in dire poverty. Haines is part of the British tennis set. He is also a bit of a fascist — an anti-Semite who, in addition, excuses England's barbarous treatment of the Irish throughout history. Added to these problems for Stephen is the irony that he is being virtually forced out of a place for which he — not Mulligan — pays the rent, and, in addition, he is still brooding over his part in his mother's unhappiness on her deathbed. What nightly surcease from his difficulties which Stephen might find is hampered by Haines's noisy nightmares, a situation which occasions Stephen's ultimatum to Mulligan about Haines's having to leave.
The false father theme is reinforced in this chapter by the many references to Shakespeare, especially to Hamlet, and these are developed at length in "Scylla and Charybdis." Already in "Telemachus," Stephen emerges as a Hamlet figure, and Mulligan as a false Horatio. Symbolically, the top of the Martello Tower becomes the heights of Elsinor, and both overlook abysses of figurative madness that both Hamlet and Stephen are facing.
After Mulligan's shave (Stephen himself detests washing and water generally), after breakfast, and after the visit of the old milk woman, the three young men go outside of the Martello Tower: Mulligan takes his plunge into the water, Haines sits on a rock watching him, and Stephen (taking up his "prophetic" ashplant) begins to walk along a path. Stephen, half in pique and half in despair, has surrendered the key to the Tower to the usurper Mulligan, and Stephen is now both symbolically and literally homeless. He has been victimized by the tyrant Mulligan, just as his country has been spiritually "usurped" and plundered by England (Haines).
