Stephen’s past is important only because it serves as the fuel of the present. Everything that Stephen does in his present life feeds off the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, making him what he is (Peake 82). When he wins social acceptance by his schoolmates at Clongowes, he does so by acting deliberately in isolation — much as Daedalus in his many endeavours: “They made a cradle of their locked hands and hoisted him up among them and carried him along till he struggled to get free” (Joyce 52). When he reports Father Dolan to the Rector, he defends his name, the symbol of his identity (Peake 71): It was wrong; it was unfair and cruel: and, as he sat in the refectory, he suffered time after time in memory the same humiliation until he began to wonder whether it might not really be that there was something in his face which made him look like a schemer and he wished he had a little mirror to see. But there could not be; and it was unjust and cruel and unfair. (Joyce 47) The myth’s pattern of flight and fall also gives shape to the novel. Each chapter ends with an attempted flight, leading into a partial failure or fall at the beginning of the next chapter. The last chapter ends with the most ambitious attempt, to fly away from home, religion, and nation to a self-imposed artistic exile (Wells 252): “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”(Joyce 247). By keeping his audience in doubt as to whether Stephen is Icarus or Daedalus, Joyce attains a control that is sustained through the rhythm of the novel’s action, the movements of its language, and the presiding myth of Daedalus and Icarus (Litz 72). Stephen Dedalus is not Joyce’s alter-ego, but another paralyzed victim of the Dublin environ>