"'History,' said Joyce's Dedalus, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.' But we do not awake. Though we constantly make a heroic attempt to rise to a level ethically superior to nature, our own nature, again and again we suffer a fall- brought low by some outburst of madness because of the limiting defect inherent in our species."(Baker XV).

Dedalus is James Joyce's literary alter ego, always appearing as the protagonist or leading character. The first quote by Dedalus "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake" is about how our past is constantly haunting us. The history of our lives never parts from us and is always taking over our minds. Baker claims that we can never "awake"from the nightmare of our past. We will try so hard to accomplish things in our life and rise higher in society but we always fail because we can never forget about former events.