Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

176James Joyceto garden in search of Mercedes . . . . A vague dissatisfactiongrew up within him as he looked on the quays and on theriver and on the lowering skies and yet he continued towander up and down day after day as if he really soughtsomeone that eluded him. (312–313)On his visit to Cork with his father, in his wanderings in thebrothel section of Dublin, on his seaward walk at the end of thefourth chapter when his chief revelation of personal destiny comes tohim, on his later walks between home and the university, on his walkwith Lynch during which he recapitulates his aesthetics, and withCranly when he formulates his decision not “to serve”—on each ofthese peripatetic excursions, his mind moves toward more valid organizationsof experience, as his feet carry him among other voices andimages and into more complex fields of perception.In the third chapter of the book, the hortations to which he isexposed during the retreat pull him down from his exaltation in sinand analyze his spiritual state into a multitude of subjective horrorsthat threaten to engulf him entirely and jeopardize his immortal soul.The conflict is resolved during a long walk which he takes blindlyand alone, and that carries him to a strange place where he feelsable to make his confession. A new synthesis is achieved through hisparticipation in the Mass. Chapter 4 shows him absorbed in a dreamof a saintly career, but his previous emotional affirmation has beenfrittered and wasted away in the performance of pedantically formalacts of piety, and he is afflicted with doubts, insecurities, rebellions.Release from conflict comes with a clear refusal of a vocation in thechurch, objectified by his decision to enter the university. And againit is on a walk that he realizes the measure of the new reality and thenew destiny.He has abandoned his father to a public house and has set offtoward the river and the sea.The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of thesentries who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and hadsought to keep him among them that he might be subject tothem and serve their ends. Pride after satisfaction upliftedhim like long slow waves. The end he had been born to serve