Episode 1 — Telemachus

The novel opens with Buck Mulligan. Stately, plump, in a yellow dressinggown, he comes up the stairhead of the Martello tower at Sandycove carrying a bowl of shaving lather with a mirror and razor crossed on top, and intones the opening of the Catholic Mass — "Introibo ad altare Dei, I will go unto the altar of God." It is the first line of the novel. Mulligan, a medical student, has been sharing the tower with Stephen Dedalus and an English visitor named Haines for the summer. Stephen, who has refused a year before to pray at his dying mother's bedside, is sleepless and silent. Mulligan needles him about it: "The aunt thinks you killed your mother." Stephen will not be drawn.

They eat breakfast. An old woman comes up the path to deliver milk, and Mulligan jokes with her in cod-Gaelic; Haines makes earnest tourist-anthropology noises about collecting Irish folklore. Stephen is irritated by all three of them — by Mulligan's mockery, by Haines's casual imperial condescension, by the old woman's deference to the Englishman. Haines has been raving in his sleep all night about a black panther with a gun. Stephen is afraid of him. He tells Mulligan, quietly, that if Haines stays, he is leaving.

The three walk down to the sea. Mulligan undresses to swim. He asks Stephen for the key to the tower; Stephen hands it over. He asks for twopence; Stephen hands that over too. Mulligan jumps into the bay. The episode's last word is Mulligan's — "Usurper" — silent, in Stephen's head. He knows now he is not coming back to the tower. He has nowhere to go. The opening movement of Ulysses is a young man being driven out of the only roof he had.