All or not at all

In the Proteus episode of Ulysses we see Stephen the poet writing. We are brought into a moment of his solitude walking on the beach and in his stream of consciousness and word play we see him franticly scribble notes on Mr. Deasy's letter. Perhaps the strongest image that stood out to me was the scene of a live dog finding the carcass of a dead dog, circling it and sniffing it.
"He stopped, sniffed it, stalked around it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody's body." (46)

This image set up for me an idea of duality (between things and narrative point of views) and connected back to the "cracked looking glass." Here this dog sees a distorted reflection of itself in the dead dog, an inevitable future and yet the dead dog remains something removed from the living dog. Much as later Stephen, when Stephen is writing, we are given the narrator's comment, "His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star?" and then later in the same paragraph Stephen's voice, "I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back. Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?" (48)

This image of Stephen and his shadow parlelles the image of the two dogs, one dead at the others feet. Stephen brings it back to an issue of the soul as the form of all forms and we are presented with his observations of finite man versus the soul, wondering if his shadow, what he seems to poetically transform into an ethereal essence, were to become infinite, would it still be his?

Ultimately we see Stephen searching, focusing on language and mentioning history again and again. The way that images are weaved into the narrative is arresting and sometimes needs re-reading to take a scene away from all the sensations that we are given in the description of sand under feet as Stephen walks on the beach.