What makes for error in our interpretation is a certain mistiness of vision due to that sentimentality from which the northern European finds it so difficult to free himself. Now what saves primitive man from emotional anarchy is the fact that he is truly envious and jealous, a lover and a hater; that he means all he says, but means it for just that passing moment or hour, as the case may be, in which these feelings actually represent his attitude, and for no longer. He may have a theory of conduct but he bases no ethical judgments upon his kaleidoscopic emotional reactions. He has thus fairly adequately solved one of the most difficult and baffling problems in the world, of balancing repression with expression of personality and, at the same time, attaining to a true integration. (Primitive Man as Philosopher)

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)