I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The "avant garde" structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really "remembered" that part of Stephen's life. The discussion on Stephen's philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen's feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen's point of view), as it represented the "lyrical form" in some rough sense.
Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn't find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious "mundanity". But I'm not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I've missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I'd love to hear what anyone else's favorite/least favorite aspects were.