ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The majority of readers of James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to associate its most famous line, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, ” with Stephen Dedalus’s intention in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to overcome his past of rigid national and religious tradition.

Detailed explanation-2: -As such, Stephen offers his rebuke of history, saying that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (2.377). He means both the nightmare of Ireland’s history of subjugation as well as his personal inability to escape the haunting history of his mother’s death.

Detailed explanation-3: -“The central questions in Ulysses about the nature of language, identity and history are central questions for Hong Kong young people, ” says Kennedy. As one of the key characters, schoolteacher Stephen Dedalus – in part a portrait of Joyce himself – says: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Detailed explanation-4: -Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce’s literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographic novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and an important character in Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses.

Detailed explanation-5: -He leaves Ireland for France in order to fulfill the artistic promise inherent in his name. In Ulysses Dedalus is once more a searcher, this time for meaning in his past and present life. He symbolizes Telemachus, the son of Ulysses (Odysseus)-here embodied in Leopold Bloom, the universal man.