Stephen's view of Shakespeare, then, encompasses many aspects of the human psyche and indeed the soul: the Procession of the members of the Holy Trinity; the relation of the past to the present; the nature of change, which always returns upon itself ("We walk through ourselves. . . ."); and the permanence of love. Basically, however, Stephen's exposition is an elaborate effort to try to identify his own place in life. His mother is dead; his father, though well meaning at times, is separated from him by an abyss of temperament. And, so far, Stephen has not succeeded in living up to the mystical and metaphorical components of his name ("What's in a name?"); he has tried to leave Ireland, to fly from its entanglements like the "hawklike man," Daedalus, but he has been forced to return to earth. He is more like Icarus, whose wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.
After Stephen's intellectual acrobatics, "Scylla and Charybdis" returns to more mundane matters. Stephen is criticized by Eglinton for demanding money for the publication of his ideas in Dana; another reference is made to Moore's upcoming get-together; Lamppost Farrell is sitting in the library's readers' room; Mulligan chides Stephen for his derogatory review of Lady Gregory's Poets and Dreamers in The Daily Express (March 26, 1903); and Mulligan recites his hymn to masturbation, "Everyman His own Wife." It is this last episode that finally convinces Stephen that there are "seas between" him and Mulligan, and coinciding with this distressing insight is Stephen's perception that there is someone behind him, the someone being Bloom, who is also leaving the library.
This linking of events strengthens the importance of the last several lines of this chapter. Stephen remembers that he once stood upon the library steps and interpreted a flock of birds as being an augury of his own destiny (Chapter Five of A Portrait), and the reader wonders if the symbolically rich sundering of Stephen and Mulligan — necessitated by Bloom's passing between them — will augur well for the young protagonist. Stephen's dream of the exotic East and the "creamfruit melon" foreshadows Bloom's kissing his wife's melons (buttocks) in "Ithaca." The allusion to Bloom as the Ancient Mariner places Stephen in the position of the Wedding Guest, one able to learn from the more experienced canvasser. And Mulligan's warning to Stephen to beware of Bloom ("Get thee a breechpad") is much more indicative of Mulligan's own latent homosexuality than of any nefarious intent on Bloom's part. In fact, with the charity that the Dublin Jew lends to Stephen, Bloom emerges in the novel's later chapters as the young man's true "father," the mystical father who, Stephen believes, is related to the son in "a mystical estate" — in contrast to physical paternity, which may be, according to Stephen, "legal fiction."
