Chapters 2 and 3 Summary

Stephen recounts the fact that his wealth and fame as a writer of children's books was the result of a "clerical error" at Gott's publishing house. Stephen had been intent on writing and intended to create a book about a group of hippies who are stabbed to death in their sleeping bags, a nice girl who is sentenced to jail time in Turkey and "mystic pretentiousness, drug-enhanced sex, amoebic dysentery." To get his novel off to its proper start, Stephen creates a background for one of his characters, a young man who spends an idyllic summer with two young female cousins. Stephen's novel was to have been called "Hashish," but when he is caught up in the story of that summer when the young man is eleven—based loosely on the summer of Stephen's eleventh year—he gives in...