>>24647285 (OP)
I've stalled out over the past three weeks for personal reasons, but I am preparing a comprehensive comparison of all the similarities and details among the stories with a slow, close re-reading. A few quick observations that I remember from my notes thus far:
-teeth, nostrils and the color yellow are mentioned frequently and consistently throughout the stories. Nasty old men's yellowed teeth, yellowed photos and so forth indicate age, and later on younger people's nice white teeth are described instead. Nasty old men's nostrils and other nostril-talk give way to less unpleasant descriptions of a young woman's nostrils (IIRC), or simply the the old woman's long beak itself in Clay.
In the first few stories, we're meant to confuse and conflate the various priest-pervert types, thinking they might possibly be the same person, but there are certain details which seem to either rule this out or at least suggest that they're not the same person (different street locations and timing of events, although these locations are very close to each other).
My main personal objective is to internalize the characters a bit more so that I have a clearer idea on the who's who for minor charaters in Ulysses (Lenehan is one memorable example). There's a concordance for "Ulysses appearances" in the back but I want to do it my own way, again to internalize it.
