...

Love love love.

Stephen, as his family's financial troubles grow, finds himself growing up too. The world as he sees it is as muddled as before, and the boy who hardly relates to other boys his age, happens to be preoccupied by love. Love at his age is more of a whimsical, fleeting feeling. His encounters with girls throughout his life always remain unfulfilled as his confidence expires, the moments of tenderness never reached. Starting in the first chapter, his decree to marry Eileen, and then later, as he becomes smitten with a new girl, paints the boy as a romantic. All of his thoughts and dreams and hopes are invested "upon her movements" as his "heart danced... like a cork upon a tide. (69)" As they both ride the lonely tram, Stephen freezes "listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him. (69)" Such a romantic as he, such a shy and uncertain boy, he sees himself seizing this fair beauty and kissing her, and curses himself when he is left in the tram alone without daring an embrace. He is even further down trodden years later when he performs a play with all of his heart for a girl that doesn't even see it.

Towards the final pages of this selection, we are confronted with fire and brimstone, of hell and suffering. Stephen, in a moment of weakness and a sort of lustful torture casts off the idyllic thoughts of love and immerses himself in purely physical pleasures, and enjoys his naughty pursuits. These moments of weakness, while he revels in his audacity and sinfulness at first, are what will propel him to "Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! (125)" The Jesuit retreat served as a reflection and realization of his deeds, and Stephen, normally such a timid, good, decent boy, has challenged not only the rules of the Jesuit school, the laws of the society he lives in, but the morals of God, and now he has to sit and think about it loooooooong and hard.

Love in and of itself is a sort of torture, a mini-hell if you will. Stephen, a lonely soul who was afraid of temptation, a boy who "doesn't smoke" or "go to bazaars", humbly went about his life as "a model youth. (76)" The whimsical ideas of love and fair girls, of poetry written in vain, were just more examples of his inability to take chances and to act upon his desires successfully. Like hell, "of all these spiritual pains by far the greatest is the pain of loss, so great, in fact, that in itself it is a torment greater than all others. (127)" Stephen's humiliation and rejection over the years in his endeavors of love cast him further and further into confusion and torment, and to him his failures here were the greatest loss he knew of. His forays with the prostitute were immediate and pragmatic ways to rebel and to indulge in worldly and sinful pleasures, but Stephen, in the face of God and more so in the more immediate face of love is left wondering "What did it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul. (126)" On a smaller scale, this exchange of money for "love" was no substitution for the real thing, and he has given up something pure and wonderful for ephemeral pleasure. His thoughts turn to Emma who "appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. (115)" Though he feared God's wrath, more immediately he was concerned with the betrayal and destruction of true love. Will his fair lady ever forgive or love him, or has he lost her and all love forever?