Stephen Dedalus
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Stephen Dedalus was James Joyce's literary alter ego, as well as the central protagonist of two of his early works: Stephen Hero, and Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel of artistic existence A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Dedalus also plays a significant role in Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses, a novel based on the events of Homer's Odyssey.
In Stephen Hero, we find the surname written as "Daedalus," an immediate allusion to the Greek figure. Upon significantly revising the mammoth Stephen Hero text into the much more compact A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce opted to shorten the name to "Dedalus" for the sake of realism (the notion of finding a turn of the century Dubliner with the precise Greek surname slightly laughable.) See Richard Ellmann's revised biography, page 148.
As a character, Stephen seems to parallel many facets of Joyce’s life and personality. As if to further corroborate this, Stephen's first name comes from the first Christian martyr and, in a curious juxtaposition, his surname references the mythological figure Daedalus, a brilliant artificer who constructed a pair of wax wings for himself and his son Icarus as a means of escaping the island of Crete, where they were imprisoned by King Minos (who contracted Daedalus to build a Labyrinth to contain the Minotaur). Some critics suggest that Stephen's surname both symbolically likens him to Daedalus, a cunning artist and aesthetic, and goes on to reflect the labyrinthine quality of Stephen's developmental journey in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The choice to use the name Dedalus could also represent Stephen's wish to "fly" away from the constrants of religion, nationality, and politics which he feels hold him back artisticly.
Quote
You speak to me of language, nationality, religion...I shall try to fly by those nets.--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 5
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
--Ulysses, Episode 9
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