Black panther

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Richard Ellmann narrates the actual events. Joyce was living at the tower, largely at Gogarty’s expense and "sufferance" (the word used by Stanislaus Joyce in his diary). Relations were strained, but Gogarty did not want to endanger his bohemian reputation, and his chance of appearing in a good light in Joyce's fiction, by putting Joyce out. Trench, whom Gogarty knew from Oxford and who had become a fervent follower of the Irish Revival, was living with them in the tower.

On the night of September 14, 1904 Trench woke up screaming about a black panther that was about to spring on him, fired his revolver at the fireplace beside which Joyce was sleeping, and then went back to sleep. His nightmare returned and he screamed once more and reached for his revolver, but Gogarty had taken it. Gogarty said, “Leave him to me,” and shot some pots and pans over Joyce’s bed, which crashed down on him. "The terrified Joyce considered this fusillade his dismissal" (175). He got up, dressed, left the tower, and walked all the way to Dublin. The next day, he wrote a note to a friend asking him to go to the tower and pack up his trunk. Ellmann comments: “Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else packing the trunk.” This event prompted Joyce to decide finally to leave Ireland, for the second time and for good. He did so with Nora Barnacle, whom he had met in June of the same year.  They boarded a ship for France in October.

Trench committed suicide on 1 June 1909 by blowing out his brains. Ellmann speculates that it was "perhaps with the very weapon with which he and Gogarty had so nearly blown out Joyce's," and it is by no means too ingenious to suppose that the black panther of his dream may have been a projection of whatever it was that he so violently feared or hated in himself. In Proteus Stephen thinks of the gun-toting Englishman as an adventurer on safari and simultaneously as the fearsome quarry he stalks: he and Mulligan are "the panthersahib and his pointer." In Oxen of the Sun Haines briefly enters as a dark gothic apparition and drinks some laudanum to quell the demon within: "In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah! (The black panther!...)"

In fictionally presenting these decisive events, Joyce made many changes. He eliminated the terror of having a firearm discharged in his direction in the confines of a small dark room. Haines does not fire his gun, and Stephen merely asks nervously the next morning, "Where is his guncase?" Gogarty’s role in the terrorizing disappears as well. Stephen’s response thus becomes softer than Joyce’s was. Sympathizing with Haines when Mulligan promises to "give him a ragging," he decides that he can remain in the tower. And instead of a dramatic break with Mulligan, he merely deepens his feeling that a break is imminent, thinking that he cannot come back to the tower on the next night. In Proteus he thinks, "I will not sleep there when this night comes." (His next thought is, "Call: no answer." Probably he is imagining showing up at the tower, yelling up at the stone slits to announce his arrival, and being rebuffed.)

Although Stephen does take his leave of Bloom much as Joyce took his leave of Gogarty—by walking off into the darkness at the end of Ithaca—the novel does not encourage readers to think that his split from Mulligan will exercise any decisive significance in his life. Instead, by setting the events in the tower on 16 June 1904, the date of his first outing with Nora Barnacle, Joyce manages to make the story more about love than alienation.