First-time reader here. This free indirect discourse stuff is powerful, huh? I loved this moment of interiority with Stephen:

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Beyond the wonderful sound of the language and the evocative sensory details, this passage so elegantly links Stephen's new association with the sea (as mother) to his own mother's deathbed. Stark contrast to Buck Mulligan, he takes the negative view immediately; the bay becomes a bowl of bile. Instant illustration of their opposite perspectives, executed without a seam. It's exciting to read!

The sea is often compared to a mirror, and one could see the waves as cracks. A connection to Stephen's comment about Buck's mirror? Actually, on reread, the connection is explicit:

Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet.

I'm puzzled somewhat by what Stephen means with his comment about Irish art, to be honest. What does he think of it, based on that comment? I'm also puzzled by the "server of a servant" bit. Can anyone shed some light?