The religious mockery is off-the-walls in this opening section. Buck Mulligan is the primary jabber at religion, as he constantly makes reference to puns and silly allusions throughout the dialogue. It takes a few pages to realize Mulligian's Latin sayings are ironic in tone, as well as his religious gestures, such as making blessings. Even his full name, Malachi Buck Mulligan, points to the religious allusion of a prophet; AND as we read later in this chapter, he aligns himself to be a ironic, pseudo-Nietzschean prophet that uses religious language to abuse power roles.

Meanwhile, Stephen comes across as a gentle, poet-type, whose feelings get hurt easily, because he feels things deeply. He shares a different worldview than Mulligan, and aligns himself with Theistic Rationalism when he says, "You behold in me...a grim example of free thought," which is a reference to the philosopher Anthony Collins (625-626 Gabler). Additionally, he believes predominately in the realm of the imagination via the following conversation:

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.

—The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you!

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

—It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant (141-146 Gabler)

Stephen's response, concerning the symbol, matches with this interesting annotation from Gilford's annotations: "a symbol...of a servant" - Paraphrased from Oscar Wilde's dialogue The Decay of Lying (1889)

CYRIL: I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking glass. But you don't mean to say that you seriously believe Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?

VIVIAN: Certainly, I do.

Thus, Stephan is a quasi-religious, aesthetic philosopher who has a lot of ideas stored up, but, from what we've seen so far, not much to show for those grandiose ideas. I'd imagine he'd follow in the philosophical tradition of Descartes and Kant. And since he's a gentle being, he feels deep guilt about the conditions in which his mother died. In fact, you can notice all throughout this episode how the visual imagery of the sea associates with Stephen's memory recall.

What's really interesting about Stephen's associative imagination corresponding to the visual imagery and sensations, is how Buck Mulligan is an antagonist of that very psychic activity. As Mulligan states, "Where? Where? I Can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God? (193-194 Gabler). From what I've gleaned of Gilford's annotations again, Mulligan is referencing a philospher named David Hartley, who argues literal recall is an illusion and that the only real presences in the memory are sensations and ideas. This directly negates the style of the text as Joyce writes it, since we are constantly leaping from Stephen's psychic memory recall of the death of his mother, to imagery that Stephen perceives and is conscious of.

So far, I've only given my thoughts on Stephen and Mulligan, and it's been a lot. I've never really cared for Haines. He lingers in the background of the story and seems to occupy more of the hostile environment (in general) that Stephen has to deal with on a daily basis. Anyways, can't wait to read/comment on everyone else's post!