In its immediate narrative context in Telemachus,
“I’m not a hero” refers to Stephen’s morbid
fear of water and to his nonaggressiveness. But
it also constitutes a pointed reference to his original
fictional name. When Joyce stayed
with Gogarty in the tower he was working on a book
called Stephen Hero, a long and eternally unfinished
autobiographical novel whose materials Joyce eventually
reworked into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The title does not imply straightforward glorification of the
protagonist. Ellmann speculates that when Joyce sought a new
one, it was “because he felt the first title might imply a
more sardonic view of his hero than he intended” (193).
As he changed Stephen Hero into the Stephen Dedalus of A
Portrait and then the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses,
he nevertheless subjected him to harsher and harsher
treatment. At the end of the first chapter of A Portrait,
Stephen is hailed as a hero by the other boys at Clongowes
Wood College, and carried in triumph like a Roman conqueror,
because he went to the rector to protest an unjust beating at
the hands of a priest whom the boys all fear. But he learns
later that the incident was a source of amusement to the
rector. After that point he cannot take leadership seriously,
even when other boys look up to him or when the priests admire
his piety. In Ulysses, the question about Stephen
seems to be not whether or not he is a hero, but whether or
not he is a total failure.
In a letter written to his brother Stanislaus from Pola in
1905, when he was still busily working on Stephen Hero,
Joyce declared, “I am sure however that the whole structure of
heroism is, and always was, a damned lie” (Ellmann, 192). He
did not change this opinion. The hero of Ulysses is
Leopold Bloom rather than Stephen Dedalus, but Bloom is
decidedly an anti-hero by the standards of ancient Greek epic. Heroism of
the type exemplified by athletes and warriors is subjected to
ironic scrutiny throughout the book, and made utterly
ridiculous in Cyclops.
