TR 2.3 - Homecoming?

[Richard Ryan]

The 'soundtrack" of Wyatt's return to the unnamed New England town he
grew up in (which we know, thanks to the Annotations, to be modeled on
Berlin, Connecticut) is a crazed internal monologue of Joycean
intensity.  The incredibly dense, highly allusive wanderings of our
hero's mind are at this point both wildly entertaining and
intimidating in their complexity.  Are we safe saying that Wyatt at
this point is entirely psychotic?  Could we go so far as to say all
the significant characters in this chapter - Wyatt's family circle as
it were - have all gone or remain mad?

The motif, begun in the last chapter, is one of both flight and
return: a flight from the neurotic wasteland of the city,
theoretically toward the healing refuge of home.  But Wyatt's maniacal
plans to redeem himself with a re-immersion in the ministry - and in
his earlier theological studies - mask his "real" entry into a
hallucinatory realm of pre-Christian pagan mythology.  This is less a
homecoming than a journey to an entirely separate reality.