I explore the ways James Joyce and a number of other important writers confronted the correlation between our sense of self and our sense of time. I place Joyce within what I see as the three basic ways in which writers in the last few centuries have tended to approach the relationship between time and its passing and the sense of the self as integral. In the first approach the self is seen as continuous; one is the same self one has been and will be, as long as one can remember or look ahead. The second view in contrast sees one as ineluctably cut off from one`s past self or, actually, from all our multiple past selves, from all the selves everyone has inevitably been throughout a so-called lifetime. Joyce may be connected with both those approaches to time, but it`s with a third that, I believe, he is most profoundly associated. That relationship to time entails a sense of transcendence, or perhaps pre-existence, a notion that our selves are indeed restricted to time, but not necessarily to this time, or this place.