Having secured Stephen's flight from Dublin at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce shows him at the beginning of Ulysses returned to Dublin from Paris, undiminished in ambition and discontent, but temporarily rebuffed, and more than ever fearful of engulfment by the demands of family, religion, and state. Stephen has been called home to the deathbed of his mother but has refused to kneel to pray for her soul; he will brood upon this all through Thursday, 16 June, the day on which the events of Ulysses take place. But if A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hints that Stephen's flight was part of, even an expression of, his immurement in the labyrinth of his own making, Ulysses will attempt a different kind of escape, or escape in a different direction; this time, it will appear, the artist must flee inwards, into the labyrinth. Instead of a clarity and integrity of soul achieved by subtraction from the mire of complexity and contingency, Ulysses offers us a movement towards aggregation and inclusiveness. As many have suggested, the book may be seen as a demonstration of Stephen's claim that he will transform the base matter of everyday life into art, for, where A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is singularly short of such base matter, Ulysses is thickly crammed with it. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was sustained by the desire to produce and sustain patterns of opposition, between the soul of Stephen and that from which it emerges. Ulysses is driven by the restless interpenetration of contraries. The most diversified of these contraries are the two central characters of the book, the young artist, Stephen Dedalus and the middle-aged canvasser of advertisements, Leopold Bloom. The significance of their meeting, in the seventeenth chapter of the book, is that it appears to represent the coming-together of art and commerce, idealism and realism, individualism and civic belonging, the spirit and the body, the son and the father, the exile and the inhabitant, the making of the soul and the making of a living.