Joyce, however, is having fun at the reader's expense in this chapter because, to read Ulysses, the reader must pass through both the treacherous rocks and the labyrinth of the National Library, with Stephen's complex intellectual expositions at its center. Also, in Homer, the wandering rocks were probably based on optical illusions, and Joyce has correspondingly filled his rendition of the myth with "false clues" and deliberately misleading language. He seems to be saying to the reader: "You've come through nine episodes, and you think that you really know Dublin — and my writing methods. Beware: you are being over-confident; Dublin and my writing methods are neither simple nor easily grasped."
These tricks of Joyce, escorting us by circuitous ways through the various routes in and around Dublin, begin at once. Father Conmee, we are told, "reset his smooth watch"; he did not, however, correct the time. Instead, he "reset" it — that is, he placed it in his pocket. In addition, we are told twice that Father Conmee is walking through Clongowes' playing fields; this is not literally true: he is returning to his old school ground in Clongowes in his memory. Also, note that Blazes Boylan's secretary, Miss Dunne, wonders whether "he [is) in love with that one, Marion," while she is thinking of William Wilkie Collins' Woman in White (remember, Boylan is readying himself for a rendezvous with Marion Bloom); "that one," however, here, is really Marian Halcombe, a woman character in Collins' novel. Moreover, Bloom does not buy Sweets of Sin; rather, he rents it, as we discover in "Ithaca." In addition, Father Cowley is not a priest in good official standing with the Church; he is a "spoiled priest," simply "Bob" Cowley, a fellow in financial straits. Bloom the dentist has no connection with the protagonist; Denis Breen never does see the solicitor John Henry Menton, but leaves his office after an hour' s wait, and later makes a faux pas when he salutes the carriage carrying Gerald Ward instead of the carriage of the Earl of Dudley; and Lamppost Farrell, who bumps into the blind stripling (the youngster whom Bloom helped in "The Lestrygonians"), is figuratively "blinder" than the lad. In all this ambiguity, however, one thing is certain: Mulligan's statement made to Haines as they both sit drinking tea certainly proves to be prophetic: "He [Stephen/Joyce] is going to write something [A Portrait] in ten years."
