Source identified1
Image design Coastal
Read & copy
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Meaning & context
Stephen compresses his troubled relation to inherited political, religious and personal history into an image of trying to wake from something oppressive that still shapes the present.
Source details
Ulysses, Episode 2 (“Nestor”), Project Gutenberg #4300. Stephen Dedalus says the line during his conversation with Mr Deasy; it is fictional dialogue inside a modernist novel and should not be flattened into Joyce’s direct historical thesis.