"Although Stephen Dedalus is an important character in James Joyce's novel, ""Ulysses"", who is, in fact, the main character in the story?"
Stephen Dedalus name, an ancient Greek!" In revising the mammoth "Stephen Hero" into the considerably more compact "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Joyce shortened the name to "Dedalus". Stephen Dedalus appears in "Ulysses" as the character who corresponds to Telemachus; less overtly, he embodies aspects of Hamlet. He is the protagonist of the first three chapters. Subsequently, Leopold Bloom is introduced, and Stephen's interactions with Bloom and his wife, Molly, form much of the final chapters' substance. Mirroring his mythological namesake, Daedalus (or Daidalos in the Greek pronunciation and transliteration), whom Ovid described in the "Metamorphoses" (VIII:183-235) as being
Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, appearing as the protagonist and antihero of his first, semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and an important character in Joyce's "Ulysses". In "Stephen Hero", an early version of what became "Portrait", Stephen's surname is spelled "Daedalus" in more precise allusion to Daedalus, the architect in Greek myth who was contracted by King Minos to build the Labyrinth in which he would imprison his wife's son the Minotaur. Buck Mulligan makes reference to the mythological namesake in "Ulysses", telling Stephen, "Your absurd