Episode 2 — Nestor

Stephen has a job. Mr. Deasy's boys' school in Dalkey, mid-morning. He is teaching a history class on Pyrrhus and Asculum — the king of Epirus whose victories cost him his army. The boys are bored. Stephen is bored. He asks them in turn to recite Lycidas; one of them, Sargent, recites it badly. The lesson ends. The boys run out to play hockey. Sargent, slow and sticky-faced, is left behind to do his sums; Stephen helps him, briefly tender, recognising in the boy's ugly persistence something of himself. He thinks of his own mother's love for him, "amor matris, subjective and objective genitive" — the only thing in the world that may be real.

He goes to collect his wages. Mr. Deasy is an Ulsterman, Protestant, Orangeist, complacent. He counts out three pounds twelve and lectures Stephen on the importance of saving them. "I paid my way," he says repeatedly, as if this were the great moral fact of his life. He moves on to history. The Jews, Deasy is sure, have been the ruin of every nation that admitted them; they have sinned against the light. Stephen, walking around the room, hears himself say: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Deasy does not quite hear him.

Deasy gives Stephen a letter he has written on foot-and-mouth disease, asking him to use his connections at the newspapers to get it printed. Stephen pockets it. He walks out across the playing field where the boys are shouting. Deasy, on the steps, calls after him with a final witticism: Ireland never persecuted the Jews because she never let them in. He is laughing at his own joke as Stephen leaves. The episode's schoolmaster is the novel's Nestor — old, opinionated, generous with bad advice.