Stephen's hyper-intellectual immersion in "his own rare thoughts," his near-total indifference to his physical welfare, and his bitterly ironic detachment from other human beings may give readers the impression that he lacks simple creaturely feeling, and to some extent Joyce seems to have agreed. The schemas which he gave to Carlo Linati and Valery Larbaud assigned a bodily organ to the last fifteen episodes of the book but not to the first three, because "Telemaco non soffre ancora il corpo" (Telemachus does not yet bear a body). The actual novel that Joyce wrote does not present Stephen quite so schematically, however, and one passage in Telemachus shows him very clearly suffering the effects of corporeal passion.

When Stephen charges Mulligan with having spoken callously about his dying mother, his emotion is palpable and his blood is hot: "Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks." One thinks of the idiom “seeing red” and the physiology that it evokes: adrenaline-charged blood rushing to the head, suffusing the cheeks, dimming the eyes. Just before this an embarrassed Mulligan has experienced a similar rush of blood in response to Stephen's rebuke of his insensitive words: "A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek." But this flush appears to reflect little more than embarrassment at having committed a social impropriety: "I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother." Mulligan assumes that Stephen's anger comes from hearing his mother described as “beastly dead”—and freethinking men should not, he supposes, be disturbed by frank references to the brutal fact of death.

But Stephen is angry because the remark wounded him. To Mulligan this is absurd ("O, an impossible person!"), but anyone with much human feeling could imagine how the words “O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead” might cause pain. A person gripped by grief feels intense narcissistic self-absorption: the foundations of life have collapsed and yet life somehow continues, unconsciously, cruelly. In such a state the most intolerable slight is to have one's feelings dismissed as negligible. That Mulligan does this to a purportedly dear friend, fails to understand why the friend would feel hurt, and then compounds the injury by going on the offensive and accusing the friend of having murdered his mother, suggests that he, not Stephen, is the one who has trouble accessing bodily feeling. For all his outgoing bonhomie, he lacks heart.

Despite what Joyce wrote in the schemas, in this part of the first chapter the pulses in Stephen's eyes, the fever in his cheeks, and "the gaping wounds" in his heart show a man who "suffers a body" to a poignant degree. The motif of corporeal feeling returns in Aeolus: "Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed."

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