Talbot's failing ploy and Stephen's inflectionless response permit Joyce to imply the ironic question of which is more absurd: forcing children to mutilate a great work of art by memorization, or Milton's doctrine of immortality itself. The answer is found in the realization that Stephen's somber point of view is the center of this chapter: Mulligan might have laughed at the absurdity of the question (while tanning Talbot's rump), but Stephen can only wonder whether, in fact, Christ did walk on water. Mired in guilt and sorrow, Stephen cannot enjoy life. He knows, for example, that his pun about a pier, that it is a "disappointed bridge," is clever, but he can think only that, when he repeats it, Haines will simply place it among his collection of Stephen's "bright" sayings; once again Stephen will be labeled as merely a jester at the court of the English tyrant.
Stephen's "personal history," with its bitter internal struggles, is also a microcosm of all of human history, seen in this chapter to be a series of life-and-death battles, ranging from ancient Greece to modern Ireland. However, the allusions to Helen, Julius Caesar, and Pyrrhus, while they are significant in a mock heroic novel based upon ancient prototypes, are less important than the references to the more contemporary betrayal and imprisonment of Ireland by England. And the spokesman for the Establishment is Garrett Deasy, who is a true West Briton — that is, he is an Irishman who imitates English manners and takes the British position on all matters.
Joyce feels that Deasy's view of Irish history is so destructive that he turns over the second half of the chapter to him, letting Deasy condemn himself with his own words. Joyce also gains an excellent structural framework for this chapter by placing Deasy at the center of the stage. In the first half of the chapter, Stephen attempted to lecture to his unwilling and somewhat obstreperous students; now Deasy is the instructor and Stephen is his reluctant interlocutor, as he repeats the part of gadfly-acolyte that he played for the celebrant Mulligan in "Telemachus."
