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Mulligan tries to downplay Stephen’s mother’s death by saying that as a medical student he sees death every day.

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Stephen is jarred back into the memory of his mother’s death by the presence of a white bowl. When Stephen’s mother dies at the end of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, her dying wish is that the atheist Stephen pray with her. He refuses and suffers from the guilt of it.

This memory is cleverly derived from Stephen’s perception of Dublin’s bay enclosing the “dull and green” sea, and to a lesser extent, to the bowl being used by mocking Mulligan.

If you ever come across it, Nabokov does a fine job anatomising the association between the bile-filled bowl and Dublin Bay, in his chapter on Ulysses in Lectures on Literature.

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Allusion to the Lord’s Prayer: “lead us not in temptation but deliver us from evil.”

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Conolly Norman (12 March 1853- February 1908) was an Irish alienist, or psychiatrist, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the Resident Medical Superintendent of a number of district asylums, most notably Ireland’s largest asylum, the Richmond District Lunatic Asylum, now known as St. Brendan’s Hospital.

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Continuing his self-aware perversion of the Eucharist, Buck Mulligan here parodies Christ’s words at the Last Supper:

“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.

And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;

For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.“ (Matthew 26: 26-28)

By using the feminine “Christine” rather than “Christian” Mulligan is imputing a sexuality to the holy matter: Christ as woman. He is further mocking the Christ figure to poke fun at Stephen’s intellectualism and former religious seriousness. Femininity will play a role throughout the novel as the magnetic force behind Ulysses' journey in Homer’s Odyssey as well as Bloom’s “search” for Molly. Joyce is planting metaphorical seeds that will bear fruit later. The careful reader can rejoice in these complexities with each additional reading.

As Mulligan holds aloft the chalice containing (or about to contain) God’s blood, he acknowledges that some of the flecks of shaving foam are experiencing difficulty in their effort to become “white corpuscles,” the antigen-destroying part of the holy substance. When medical students encounter miracles, they like to get their facts straight.

Alludes to the Black Mass in which a woman’s body plays the part of the altar.

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A raised circular platform in the center of the tower’s flat roof, once used as a swivel-gun mount.

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Perhaps derived from Romeo and Juliet (III, iii, 1). “Romeo, come forth, come forth, thou fearful man.” Also, alludes to kinchin or child and the sound of a cutting knife.

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The English name for Dun Laoghaire, a town on the south shore of Dublin Bay.

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Attic Greek for “The sea! The sea!” Notably quoted from Xenophon’s Anabasis, where it appears as the cry of joy uttered by the 10,000 Greeks (a mercenary group returning from a failed campaign in Persia in 401 BC) when they saw the Black Sea; that they could see the Black Sea meant they were close to friendly territory and were finally safe.

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Greek for “over the winedark sea” from Homer’s The Odyssey.

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