One great goal

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Thornton identifies two close analogues to Deasy's statement: Alfred, Lord Tennyson's hopeful vision of "one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves," at the end of In Memoriam (1850), and Matthew Arnold's lines from Westminster Abbey (1881), "For this and that way swings / The flux of mortal things, / Though moving inly to one far-set goal." Gifford observes that by the end of the 19th century such "faith in the inevitability of man's moral and spiritual progress...was widely regarded as a feeble substitute for vital spiritual commitment."

The idea that history has a telos or purposeful end-point had long been associated in western culture with the historiography of the Christian church, whose ideas of apocalypse, judgment, and revelation Joyce contrives to associate, derisively, with the "goal" being scored on the hockey field. The Christian conception of history is marked by a beginning (the Creation), a middle (the Incarnation), and an end (the Last Judgment). Although God exists outside of time, he reveals his providential plan in such linear developments, and so history can be seen as the ongoing record of his self-manifestation, with the fullest revelation coming at the end of time. Some secular western historiographies, such as Hegel's description of human history as a progressively greater manifestation of Geist or Spirit, have drawn on this Christian model, and in 19th century Britain the swelling tide of industry, science, empire, and commerce encouraged a new belief in "progress."

Against such schemes depicting history as a linear progression, Joyce seems to have preferred circular or cyclical models which describe human experience perpetually revisiting similar states of being, with no clear beginning or end. The early lecture "Drama and Life" (1900) describes eternal human truths that express themselves perpetually and unchangingly in human experience. The Viconian historiography of Finnegans Wake augments this eternal sameness with the idea of recurring cycles.

In Proteus, Stephen continues thinking about ideas of history. He harshly dismisses the triumphant transcendentalism of Deasy's "one great goal" when he watches a live dog sniffing a dead one on the tidal flats: "Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody's body." Here, the great goal of life is clearly death. When Stephen contemplates the decomposing body of the drowned man at the end of Proteus, it becomes apparent that his focus on the death of the organic body does not represent simply a cynical or nihilistic rejection of metaphysical explanations; but it does constitute a rejection of Christian metaphysics.