Ulysses/Telemachus

Summary: the opening lines, the entire opening chapter, is like a cannon being fired right at Rome. Right on the nose.

Introibo ad altare Dei. - I will go in to the altar of God. The book starts, right off the bat, by mocking the Catholic Mass, starting ceremonially, and invoking the beginning of Homer's Odyssey.

Kinch - nickname for Stephen; means "knife" (an image that recurs throughout Ulysses)

For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. - Mocking the Catholic Mass

Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? - Mocks the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during Mass. Suggests there must be some kind of "electric current" or other-worldly science that makes transubstantiation happen. This is another recurring theme throughout Ulysses - both Stephen and Leopold are well-versed in modern scientific concepts, and references to Newtonian science, Cartesian mathematics, and even Einsteinian concepts of space-time make their appearance throughout the book.

Malachi Mulligan - a name with the stress in the first syllable of the first and last names (the two dactyles).

jejune - dull or insipid, immature or childish

Haines is the third roommate of Daedalus and Mulligan.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. / Lend us a loan of your noserad to wipe my razor. - The blade/knife imagery again.

The bard's noserag. A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you?

Itsn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? - reference to Algy is Algernon "Algy" Swinburne, whose poem, "A Triumph of Time," contains the line: "I will go back to the great sweet mother / mother & lover" (referring to the sea)

The snotgreen sea. The scrotuntightening sea. - A reference to Homer's "wine-dark sea," made more Irish.

Epi oinopa ponton. - The original Greek, translating into the recurring phrase, "upon the wine-colored sea." The irony here is, this is one of the first terms any Greek student will learn. Mulligan pretends to know Greek, but uses two very common Greek phrases, the other being Thalatta - from Xeonophon's Anabasis.)