Garrett Deasy

Garrett Deasy is the minor character of the novel. Garrett Deasy is the headmaster in the school where Stephen Dedalus teaches and is pompous and opinionated. He, as a person who creates a cohesive community, knows that his own strategy cannot be realized in life on his own. He knows that he needs a highly functional team. Garrett Deasy knows that a cohesive community (for children and teachers) will enhance stability, keep the teaching staff and attract investment. He knows that a person needs a close connection with others, and knows how to create this connection.

Garrett Deasy writes a self-important letter to the evening newspaper which Dedalus helps get published, on the subject of foot and mouth disease. This thesis looks at how food references are embedded in the text in a discourse that often has very little to do with the food itself. By using a close critical reading of the primary text and an analysis that is based on archival, sociological and literary readings, that proves that Joyce created a meta-text that not only used the visual, aural and olfactory representations of food to contextualize a city trapped between the famine and Irish Independence, but to make inferences such as Stephen’s rejection of solid food being related to issues of identity, and Bloom’s eclectic tastes in food as a sign of his otherness.

Stephen' s reaction to the sermon's dullness is much the same as his reaction to Garrett Deasy' s letter on hoof and mouth disease in “Ulysses.” The sermon hinges on the different rhetorical interpretations of the seventh word, the Biblical “It’s finished” of Christ on the cross. Garrett Deasy's only interest in the sermon is in what translation of the word Dr. Dillon will give.