Joyce was a talented singer, for example, and in Ulysses Leopold Bloom notes the excellence of Stephen's tenor voice after hearing him sing Johannes Jeep's song "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit".

In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait, Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus," a more obvious allusion to the mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they had been imprisoned by King Minos.

Buck Mulligan makes reference to Stephen's mythic namesake in Ulysses, telling him, "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!"

[3] Stephen's surname may also reflect the labyrinthine quality of his developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.The childhood of Stephen Dedalus is recounted using vocabulary that changes as he grows, in a voice not his own but sensitive to his feelings.

The reader experiences Stephen's fears and bewilderment as he comes to terms with the world in a series of disjointed episodes.

[4] Stephen attends the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, where the apprehensive, intellectually gifted boy suffers the ridicule of his classmates while he learns the schoolboy codes of behaviour.

However, thanks to a scholarship obtained for him by Father Conmee, Stephen is able to attend Belvedere College, where he excels academically and becomes a class leader.

[7] Stephen squanders a large cash prize from school, and begins to see prostitutes, as distance grows between him and his drunken father.

[9] Stephen pays special attention to those on pride, guilt, punishment and the Four Last Things (death, judgement, Hell, and Heaven).

He feels that the words of the sermon, describing horrific eternal punishment in hell, are directed at him and, overwhelmed, comes to desire forgiveness.

[10] Stephen takes time to consider, but has a crisis of faith because of the conflict between his spiritual beliefs and his aesthetic ambitions.

Along Dollymount Strand he spots a girl wading, and has an epiphany in which he is overcome with the desire to find a way to express her beauty in his writing.

[11] As a student at University College, Dublin, Stephen grows increasingly wary of the institutions around him: Church, school, politics and family.

[12] An increasingly dry, humourless Stephen explains his alienation from the Church and the aesthetic theory he has developed to his friends, who find that they cannot accept either of them.

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.In Ulysses, Stephen is back in Dublin, having returned because his mother was dying.

Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan.

The two men urinate in the backyard, Stephen departs and wanders off into the night,[16] and Bloom goes to bed, where Molly is sleeping.

Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.