Nestor associated shells with money because they are
hollow, and an obsession with money empties life of its
humanity. But the shells on the beach were once life forms.
Houses on the shore are "Human shells,"
harboring life for a time and then emptied. Parts of the body,
like Stephen's teeth, are constantly being built up or decayed
into husks: "That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go
to a dentist, I wonder, with that money?"
As a person walks on the beach, he or she is helping to break
up the skeletons of countless small creatures: "Stephen
closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells"; "Loose sand and shellgrit crusted
her bare feet." The ocean is perpetually "Driving
before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes,
silly shells," working to crush these husks into
bits.
Humanity is not exempt. One sentence after Stephen thinks of
the surf pushing shells to shore, he imagines the drowned
man's body rising to the surface and "bobbing landward."
His body too will be recycled:
"God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose
becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe,
tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead."
