I am not quite sure what to make of the fractured vignettes in the Wandering Rocks Episode. Surely it is and interesting and a well timed lull it what seemed to be a focus on Stephen and Bloom. So, in a way that is just what Joyce may be doing here- breathing life and giving depth to other characters and situations that up until not have remained on the periphery. In the first vignette with father Conmee – the third person removal is unavoidable. Nearly every other paragraph begins with, “Father Conmee this,” or “Father Conmee that,” if anything this chapter brings to the forefront the narrator’s role in the course of events and that perhaps he too is part of the story (or what enlivens it.) Through the narration of Father Conmee we see how the narrator proves to be quite editorial and omnipotent in his remarks- “ Father Conmee walked and walking, smiled for he thought on father Bernard Vaughans’s droll eyes and cockney voice.”
In particular these different insights shed light on the relationship between Simon Dedalus and his children. Simon is the absent father, the inadequate father and the father nominally and not in any other way. This, I think, is important to note in comparison to Bloom who longs to have had a boy to father in a close way. In a sense Bloom plays the role of a father to his wife Molly. He makes her breakfast in bed, buys her smutty novels, encourages her singing career and now that their relationship is no longer sexual he sees her in a more detached way.
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your use of the term "fractured vignettes" kind of contains the answer to that question, since they seem to emphasize a fractured society. the proper name "Father Conmee" repeated is interesting, too, because he thinks of himself entirely in terms of his role, just as Simon Dedalus insists on certain rights as a father, the viceroy inhabits his role, Stephen eschews the role of singer... In "Nausicaa" Bloom writes a note for Gertie MacDowell, of whom we learn in this chapter that she is in love with the boy who has a bicycle. The note reads, "I am..." But we don't find out what he is. The fractured society has something to do with all these empty roles, not fully inhabited. At the same time, it's somehow important that Bloom, like Odysseus in the Cyclops episode, is "nobody." He (Bloom) does reaffirm in that episode that he is a Jew.
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