Stephen Dedalus

Stephen Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, as well as the protagonist 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 monumental Ulysses. A number of critics, such as Harold Bloom, have named a younger Stephen as the narrator of the first three stories in Dubliners. In Stephen Hero, an early version of what became Portrait, we find the surname written as "Daedalus," a more precise allusion to the Greek mythological figure (as Buck Mulligan puts it in Ulysses, "Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!") Upon significantly revising the mammoth Stephen Hero text into the much more compact A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce opted to shorten the name to "Dedalus". Stephen Dedalus also appears in Ulysses as a parallel to Telemachus and, less overtly, Hamlet. He is the protagonist of the three preliminary chapters of that work, before Leopold Bloom is introduced, and his... full article at wikipedia