Joyce's Portrait ends with the following words:
Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.And the Ulysses opens in the following way:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.Buck Mulligan is a roommate of Stephen Dedalus who is now no longer an innocent young man in the Ulysses. In the Portrait, Stephen struggled to come to terms with Christian faith, and eventually renounces the Jesuit canon and forms his own views on beauty, truth, and the good through his own interpretations of Aristotle and Aquinas. Stephen takes his own flight into life with the last words left behind on his notebook (the words quoted above.)
Mulligan's place is the starting point of Stephen's new life as an artist. At this point in his life, Stephen no longer cares enough for the Jesuit cliches, and instead takes delight in inventing his own meanings for the surrounding environment and events. As such, the Ulysses is satirical and human-centered as ever. The entrance of Mulligan in the above quoted line is already a satirization of the Christian ritual of bringing the bowl and towel to the priest.
But this doesn't mean that Joyce somehow disrespects Christianity in the Ulysses. Rather, by depicting it with humour, Joyce is trying to show that humans don't have to confirm unconditionally to one dominant belief. Ulysses is essentially a book of polytheism. Which is very close to how Japanese people view the world. So I am not too shaken by Joyce's satire compared to some English reviewers back in Joyce's time (who called the novel "pornographic.")
This big fat book, 732 pages long, is written in rhythmical English. It's an English that is difficult to read but fun to read aloud and easy to memorize its sounds. That doesn't mean that I actually read it aloud in my room or in a cafe, but the notes ring naturally in my mind as the story progresses. Looking forward to discovering the evolution of Joyce's style and ideas.
