The shadows of the past meander with the present, blowing around and around throughout a cycle of epic consulations, from an age when Ireland waited on the precipice of transformation. Joyce places the action of his story in the center of Irish commerce and culture of Ireland. Dublin in the first half of the nineteenth century comes alive in those pages, as the old world of Europe slowly progresses forward into the dawning of a new modernistic era. Within twenty years, starting with the first world war, the old vision, the last traces of Romanticism would be extinguished in the coming disillusionment of a primordial time. The lost vestiges of those promises dreamed of by the early thinkers in the enlightenment, surviving into the stale complexities of the Victorians, were sinking into the oceans surrounding the final foundations of sanctitude. The horrors of war, the thundering sounds of mechanized machinery churning past the living into the deepest chambers of death, had driven the hopeful yearnings for a universal utopia into the dust-shrouded shadows of antiquity. As he stared into the lens of inherent observation, a round crystal oracle of intuition, Joyce was able to present a picture of a world on the edge of disappearance, unknowingly to the inhabitants of the world; a space and time lost forever in the ever-flowing currents of history. His characters move in the dimming twilight of a vast spectrum of sight and sound. They arrive quickly on the stage of imagination, and then pass quickly from our view. They slip away as ghosts from a long abandoned moor; their final last strands of reality dissipitating into the tales of mythology built around the lands of fairy, slowly awakening to the dawn of morning, when the dew carries in her air the magical expectations of grandeur. Joyce will take the reader on a journey; down this river of the unexpected, and he uses as his vehicle, the sails that will propel his invisible vessel down those choppy waters of the cherub, the ancient voice of the long forgotten narrative.
Ulysses opens with prose beautifully placed and carefully designed by Joyce to perform a distinguishable purpose, carrying characteristics that help to begin the novel in a new and interesting way. As we have seen, the first forty to fifty pages can be broken down into three episodes that serve as a transitional grey area in the life of the main character, Stephen Dedalus. Within these three different episodes,
