Names

In the end of the second section, Stephen turns fully to seeing himself as Daedalus, explicitly rejecting the priest's encouragement to consider Stephen the martyr. The tone seems to indicate that Joyce identifies with this Stephen for the first time.

Firstly, when considering the priesthood, Stephen worries that his life will be without the aesthetic beauty his creative side so desires: "It was a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares." (140)  He examines the life of the priest, and has no care for the prestige or spiritual wisdom, he only wants to be able to study and experience the beautiful.

Then, entering the priesthood becomes a kind of damnation, replacing his previous scrupulousness about spiritual sin.  He wondered "at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened to end for ever, in time an in eternity, his freedom." (141)  His freedom here replaces his desire for salvation, or as others have pointed out, his preoccupation with avoiding hell.  Now what seems to him to be the incarceration of a priest's life replaces this hell.

He then outright recognizes this change and his desire for his own wisdom: "He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world." (142)  He accepts that this life would go against his previous, that he would be among the snares.

The voice of the narrator now seems to strongly identify with Stephen (the most striking change of the passage) in the use of simple declarative sentences with little purchase available for mocking Stephen: "All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it." (143)  Stephen's thoughts have been given high status as agreeable, here and in the final sentence:
"And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil giving utterance, like the voice of Nature herself, to that plain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children every time." (143)

The "better things" is disassociated from salvation, and implied to mean a material security in the context of his family, and search for beauty for Stephen.