Father Ong goes on to define "the great fiction of the West; the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world, the fiction which seeks to erase all sense of plight, of confusing weakness, from man's consciousness, and which above all will never admit such a sense as a principle of operation". Man so constituted, he notes, cannot afford to give, since giving recognizes the fact of otherness, of a portion of being neither susceptible to his control nor violable to his gaze; this works out alike between man and man, and between man and God. It is precisely this fiction of self-containment that Joyce defines in successively more elaborate images, from Mr Duffy's careful control over every detail of life through the tightly-bounded ethical world of Exiles and Stephen's "All or not at all" to HCE's solipsistic nightmare. What beats against all these people is the evidence of otherness: the ghosts in Dubliners, Richard Rowan's voices on the strand at dawn) Stephen's fear of a "malevolent reality" and his collapse into Dublin itself ("I have much, much to learn"), the voices and tappings that derange Earwicker's slumbers like leaves, twigs, and stones dropped into a pool that craves stagnation. (Dublin's Joyce)