James Joyce -Symbol Analysis

One of the more prevalent symbols in the book is one of individual freedom. The ability to be the person you want to be, the person you really are, and to do what you enjoy doing and say what you think without detriment. The ability to exist, one could say. This is expressed in several ways. Firstly, his name's Dedalus, for crying out loud! You can't be more obvious than that! Dedalus (the Greek one) made himself a set of wings to escape the maze he had built for another king. To escape the confines that his intellect and talent had made for him. Dedalus (back to the future) is faced with endless problems to being himself. His family's politically divided, and after a while is poor. His school is religious to the nth degree. He's unsure of himself for most of his youth. He possesses radical ideas and opinions frowned upon by most of the rest of Ireland. He doesn't fit in. To make a long story short, his life is a cage. No matter what he might be, he is locked into this cage of Ireland. His religion, his family, his nation's beliefs trap him. And his opinions only seem to make everyone else push him further away.

He has to escape. At the end of chapter (is it a chapter, or a segment, or what?) 4, Dedalus suddenly has this great realization of who he is and what life means. He's at first trapped by his childhood, not knowing what kind of person to be, going along with the only advice his family can give. His mother says to follow the school's and church's teachings. His father talks about himself. He doesn't know what he is. Then he turns to sin and prostitutes for a while before realizing that this isn't him either. He goes back to everything he was taught before. If it isn't one hand, it must be the other. But he doesn't fit in there, either. And it's not as if he isn't a good Jesuit. His teacher asked him to think about taking a position as a priest, and he gets several positions of merit, let's call them, while in the schools. He's a pretty good religious kid, but that's not who he is. Dedalus, myth, was not just some genius who existed for building mazes. He wanted to live on his own. Sure, he was great, and I'm sure being the king's mazemaker gets you some perks, like a home and food, but it wasn't him. Neither is Dedalus, Stephen, religious. He doesn't belong there. He isn't who his parents and teachers keep telling him to be, he's something unique. He realizes that there's more to life than the extremes he's been experiencing. But he still doesn't really know who he is.

He keeps talking with Cranly about what to do. Now that he's free, he doesn't know where to go from there. All he does know is that his mother and society keeps telling him to change his radical and wrong ways. As he puts it, "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets" (Joyce 220). He can't quite figure out where to go from here, what to become. All he does know is that he can't stay there. All he knows is that to become an individual he must throw off entirely all expectations of others and live entirely on his own. But he can't even decide whether or not he should receive Easter Communion because his mother asked him to. He's not completely free yet. He has begun to flown, one could say, but isn't accustomed to flying and wants to rest for a bit on land. The only question is, what land? Being free is not only to fly away, but to know where to fly. Dedalus, myth, was still restrained in that he could not fly high into the air. Dedalus, Stephen, does not now where to go from here, or how high to fly. Should he not go because he does not fully believe in the church, or should he be kind to his mother despite his lack of belief? Should he fly high and far away, or stay close to the ground and run along it for a while? Freedom is useless if one doesn't know what they're going to do with it. What is the point of being free if you don't know how you will use that freedom?