Joyce's constant use of allegory mixed with a history to literary references hint at an answer lying with-in past, present, and future itself, where time is held frozen in an imaginary state. Joyce becomes Elijah in a momentary glance, encompassing the Omega and the Alpha, as his prophetic gaze reaches for a promised land of hope, redemption, circling vercessitude. French again on this connection between past, space, and time:
"The allusions---correspondences that reach outside the book---have a function or functions, somewhat different from the correspondences and mysteries. On the lowest level, they serve to fix character: the esoteric nature of Stephen's allusions, the comic errors and misunderstandings that occur in Bloom's, provide a good deal of our knowledge...." (6)
We therefore observe Bloom, Stephen, and company involved in a philosophical discussion on the meaning of Hamlet; leading Stephen to draw some rather interesting conclusions of the nature of the metaphysical world. References are given once again to the temporary relationship of man to the esoteric world. The discussions concerning ghosts, the father, Hamlet, the obscure missing elements in the life of Shakespeare, his marriage to Ann Hathaway, the true authorship of Shakespeare's writings point to the finite being of life. Stephen is correct to conclude that each person has become a ghost, that we are only visitors to this material world awaiting entrance into the infinite nirvana of the nonmaterial, a spiritual world of the imagination. In this passage from Ulysses, Stephen speaks on this metaphor of "ghosts" taking on an almost allegorical literary place inside these circling winds of time.
"As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the male on my right breast is where it was when I was born, through all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense imagination, when the mind....." (7)
It is quite right for him to joke in pleasant satirical terms to the answer to ghosts,
"What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt as Paris lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum,
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