Baker Quote Analysis

“’History,’ said Joyce’s Daedalus, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.’ But we do not awake. Though we constantly make a heroic attempt to rise to a level ethnically superior to nature, our own nature, again and again we suffer a fall- brought low by some outburst of madness because of the limiting defects inherent in our species.” (Baker XV)

This quote from Baker XV describes how humans are imperfect. However, he notes that we choose not to believe this. Humans cannot outrun nature, because our own nature brings us down. It summarizes the human thought process of how we are better than nature and each other. The quote also says that outbursts of madness are a defect in our species. This is probably getting at how humans think irrationally and with emotion. We are always in a form of a nightmare, one we cannot escape. Imagine having a nightmare about a nightmare, you always wake up in a worse situation. This is how Baker describes human's natural flaws.