Ulysses

TRY to trace what Stephen thinks and feels, sees, hears, smells through this. Read first WITHOUT the footnotes.

This is the most intimidating piece of work in the textbook yet. I just wanted to mention that. It’s all for the footnotes, which are necessary and I did my best to avoid them at first. I was too confused by that though, but I tried not to concentrate on them.
The imagery is interesting and it makes things feel sort of strange and dreamlike. It starts off that way at least. He’s walking on a beach, “I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” He sees these sights and these colors, “Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.” He closed his eyes to better take in the sounds there, “his boots crushing crackling wrack and shells.” In doing this his mind wonders if the world might have left him or if he might find himself suddenly over a cliff were he to open his eyes again. He takes in the sounds still, “Crush, crack, crik, crick.” I liked that he didn’t simply take one word and repeat it, instead he expressed the variety of the noises with his words. He imagines others walking on this stretch of sand. The visit to his aunt and uncle is choppy, you can tell he sees it clearly, but he doesn't linger long on what they might be thinking, but then how would he know truly? The imagined version of his uncle doesn't seem very sympathetic at times and is rather flighty to me, but again, this is what Stephen is imagining. You can tell who he sees as the primary person in that house, though later he refers to it as "aunt Sara's."
He gets lost in his own thoughts so easily, thinking about Virgin Mary having no naval, how he’ll never be a saint or how his family thinks so at least (his uncle most likely), books named by letters. He almost entirely misses his aunt’s home altogether. The jumping here throws me off. I can’t follow him easily. I can’t tell what he’s dealing with and what he is just thinking.

On that first remark, you read (or posted on) this AFTER Finnegan's--is this really more intinidating than that?
Not given how much you get of what's happening here--good job!
How does this compare for you to Woolf's stream of consciousnes in "The Mark on the Wall?"
It might help to realize that Stephen is a sholar of languages ad philosophy who teaches in a boys' school and is a lapsed Catholic--all like the young Joyce!
I hope you read the whole novel later on (there are several guides to it)--it's not all like this, and as you see, Joyce's use of language is AMAZING, and often amazingly BEAUTIFUL.