ULYSSESS

by James Joyce
Themes, Characters, Symbols, Style
 THEMEȘ
THE QUEST FOR PATERNITY

At its most basic level, Ulysses is a book about Stephen’s search for a symbolic father and Bloom’s search for a son. In this respect,
the plot of Ulysses parallels Telemachus’s search for Odysseus, and vice versa, in The Odyssey. Bloom’s search for a son stems at
least in part from his need to reinforce his identity and heritage through progeny. Stephen already has a biological father, Simon
Dedalus, but considers him a father only in “flesh.” Stephen feels that his own ability to mature and become a father himself (of
art or children) is restricted by Simon’s criticism and lack of understanding. Thus Stephen’s search involves finding a symbolic
father who will, in turn, allow Stephen himself to be a father. Both men, in truth, are searching for paternity as a way to reinforce
their own identities. Stephen is more conscious of his quest for paternity than Bloom, and he mentally recurs to several
important motifs with which to understand paternity. Stephen’s thinking about the Holy Trinity involves, on the one hand, Church
doctrines that uphold the unity of the Father and the Son and, on the other hand, the writings of heretics that challenge this
doctrine by arguing that God created the rest of the Trinity, concluding that each subsequent creation is inherently different.
Stephen’s second motif involves his Hamlet theory, which seeks to prove that Shakespeare represented himself through the
ghost-father in Hamlet, but also—through his translation of his life into art—became the father of his own father, of his life, and
 THEME:THE REMORSE OF CONSIENCE

The phrase agenbite of inwit, a religious term meaning “remorse of conscience,” comes to Stephen’s mind again and again in
Ulysses. Stephen
. associates the phrase with his guilt over his mother’s death—he suspects that he may have killed her by
refusing to kneel and pray at her sickbed when she asked. The theme of remorse runs through Ulysses to address the feelings
associated with modern breaks with family and tradition. Bloom, too, has guilty feelings about his father because he no longer
observes certain traditions his father observed, such as keeping kosher. Episode Fifteen, “Circe,” dramatizes this remorse as
Bloom’s “Sins of the Past” rise up and confront him one by one. Ulysses juxtaposes characters who experience remorse with
characters who do not, such as Buck Mulligan, who shamelessly refers to Stephen’s mother as “beastly dead,” and Simon
Dedalus, who mourns his late wife but does not regret his treatment of her. Though remorse of conscience can have a repressive,
paralyzing effect, as in Stephen’s case, it is also vaguely positive. A self-conscious awareness of the past, even the sins of the past,
helps constitute an individual as an ethical being in the present.
THEME: COMPASSION AS HEROIC

In nearly all senses, the notion of Leopold Bloom as an epic hero is laughable—his job, talents, family relations, public relations,
and private actions all suggest his utter ordinariness. It is only Bloom’s extraordinary capacity for sympathy and compassion that
allows him an unironic heroism in the course of the novel. Bloom’s fluid ability to empathize with such a wide variety of beings—
cats, birds, dogs, dead men, vicious men, blind men, old ladies, a woman in labor, the poor, and so on—is the modern-day
equivalent to Odysseus’s capacity to adapt to a wide variety of challenges. Bloom’s compassion often dictates the course of his day
and the novel, as when he stops at the river Liffey to feed the gulls or at the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy. There is a network
of symbols in Ulysses that present Bloom as Ireland’s savior, and his message is, at a basic level, to “love.” He is juxtaposed with
Stephen, who would also be Ireland’s savior but is lacking in compassion. Bloom returns home, faces evidence of his cuckold
status, and slays his competition—not with arrows, but with a refocused perspective that is available only through his fluid
capacity for empathy.
THEME:PARALLAX OR NEED FOR MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

Parallax is an astronomical term that Bloom encounters in his reading and that arises repeatedly through the course of the
novel. It refers to the difference of position of one object when seen from two different vantage points. These differing
viewpoints can be collated to better approximate the position of the object. As a novel, Ulysses uses a similar tactic. Three main
characters—Stephen, Bloom, and Molly—and a subset of narrative techniques that affect our perception of events and
characters combine to demonstrate the fallibility of one single perspective. Our understanding of particular characters and
events must be continually revised as we consider further perspectives. The most obvious example is Molly’s past love life.
Though we can construct a judgment of Molly as a loose woman from the testimonies of various characters in the novel—
Bloom, Lenehan, Dixon, and so on—this judgment must be revised with the integration of Molly’s own final testimony.
MOTIFS: LIGHTNESS AND DARKNESS, THE HOME USURPED, THE EAST

The traditional associations of light with good and dark with bad are upended in Ulysses, in which the two protagonists are
dressed in black, and the more menacing characters are associated with light and brightness. This reversal arises in part as a
reaction to Mr. Deasy’s anti-Semitic judgment that Jews have “sinned against the light.” Blazes Boylan, Bloom’s nemesis, is
associated with brightness through his name and his flashy behavior, suggesting surface without substance. Bloom’s and
Stephen’s dark colors suggest a variety of associations: Jewishness, anarchy, outsider/wanderer status.

Stephen’s and Bloom’s lack of house keys throughout Ulysses symbolizes usurpation. Stephen pays the rent for the Martello
tower, where he, Buck, and Haines are staying. Buck’s demand of the house key is thus a usurpation of Stephen’s household
rights, and Stephen recognizes this and refuses to return to the tower. Meanwhile, Bloom’s home has been usurped by Blazes
Boylan, who comes and goes at will and has sex with Molly in Bloom’s absence.

The motif of the East appears mainly in Bloom’s thoughts. For Bloom, the East is a place of exoticism, representing the promise of
a paradisiacal existence. Bloom’s hazy conception of this faraway land arises from a network of connections. For Bloom and the r
the East becomes the imaginative space where hopes can be realized. The only place where Molly, Stephen, and Bloom all meet
is in their parallel dreams of each other the night before, dreams that seem to be set in an Eastern locale.
CHARACTERS: BLOOM

Leopold Bloom functions as a sort of Everyman—a bourgeois Odysseus for the twentieth century. At the same time, the novel’s
depiction of his personality is one of the most detailed in all literature. Bloom is a thirty-eight-year-old advertising canvasser. His
father was a Hungarian Jew, and Joyce exploits the irony of this fact to such an extent that readers often forget Bloom’s Irish
mother and multiple baptisms. Bloom’s status as an outsider, combined with his own ability to envision an inclusive state, make
him a figure who both suffers from and exposes the insularity of Ireland and Irishness in 1904. Yet the social exclusion of Bloom is
not simply one-sided. Bloom is clear-sighted and mostly unsentimental when it comes to his male peers. He does not like to drink
or to gossip, and though he is always friendly, he is not sorry to be excluded from their circles. When Bloom first appears in
Episode Four of Ulysses, his character is noteworthy for its differences from Stephen’s character, on which the first three episodes
focus. Stephen’s cerebrality makes Bloom’s comfort with the physical world seem more remarkable. This ease accords with his
practical mind and scientific curiosity. Whereas Stephen shuts himself off from the material world to ponder the workings of his
own perception, Bloom is bending down to his cat, wondering how her senses work. Bloom’s comfort with the physical also
manifests itself in his sexuality, a dimension mostly absent from Stephen’s character. We get ample evidence of Bloom’s sexuality,
while Stephen seems inexperienced and celibate.
CHARACTERS: BLOOM II

Other disparities between the two men further define Bloom’s character: where Stephen is depressive and somewhat dramatic, Bloom is mature
and even-headed. Bloom possesses the ability to cheer himself up and to pragmatically refuse to think about depressing topics. Yet Bloom and
Stephen are similar, too. They are both unrealized artists. Bloom’s conception of art is bourgeois, in the sense that he considers art as a way to
effect people’s actions and feelings in an immediate way. From his desire to create a newer, better advertisement, to his love poem to Molly, to his
reading of Shakespeare for its moral value, Bloom’s version of art does not stray far from real-life situations. Bloom’s sense of culture and his
aspiration to be “cultured” also seem to bring him close to Stephen. Two emotional crises plague Bloom’s otherwise cheerful demeanor —the
breakdown of his male family line and the infidelity of his wife, Molly. The untimely deaths of both Bloom’s father and only son, Rudy, lead Bloom
to feel cosmically lonely and powerless.. We slowly realize that the first crisis of family line is related to the second crisis of marital infidelity: the
Blooms’ intimacy and attempts at procreation have broken down since the death of their only son. Bloom’s reaction to Molly’s decision to look
elsewhere for sex is complex. That other men appreciate his wife does not bother him. He realizes that Blazes Boylan is a paltry replacement for
himself, and he ultimately cheers himself by recontextualizing the problem. Boylan is only one of many, and it is on Molly that Bloom should
concentrate his own energies. In fact, it is this ability to shift perspective by sympathizing with another viewpoint that renders Bloom heroic. His
compassion is evident throughout—he is charitable to animals and people in need, his sympathies extend even to a woman in labor. Bloom’s
masculinity is frequently called into question by other characters; hence, the second irony of Ulysses is that Bloom as Everyman is also somewhat
feminine. And it is precisely his fluid, androgynous capacity to empathize with people and things of all types—and to be both a symbolic father
and a mother to Stephen—that makes him the hero of the novel.
CHARACTERS: MOLLY

Over the course of the novel, we get a very clear picture of Bloom and Stephen because we witness their interactions with many different people
and see what they are thinking throughout all of these interactions. For most of the novel we only see Molly Bloom through other people’s eyes,
so it may be tempting to dismiss her as a self-centered, unfaithful woman. The way we decide to view her will require us to reevaluate the
understanding we have thus far formed of Leopold Bloom. If we focus on the “vulgarity” and physicality of her monologue, our built-up
sympathies with Bloom as the well-meaning husband of a loose woman are ratified. But a more nuanced understanding of her involves seeing her
as an outgoing woman who takes a certain pride in her husband, but who has been feeling a lack of demonstrative love. This idea yields a
reevaluation of Bloom as being unfaithful in his own ways and complicit in the temporary breakdown of their marriage.Like Bloom, Molly is a
Dublin outsider. She was raised in the military atmosphere of Gibraltar by her father, Molly never knew her mother. Bloom associates Molly with
the “hot-blooded” Mediterranean regions, and, to a lesser degree, the exoticism of the East. Molly seems to organize her life around men and to
have very few female friends. She enjoys being looked at and gains self-esteem from the admiration of men. Molly is extremely self-aware and
perceptive. She is frank about topics that other people are likely to sentimentalize—intimacy, mourning, and motherhood, for example. She is
also frank about the extent to which living involves adaptations of different roles. Her sense of this truth—which is perhaps related to her own
career as a stage singer—aligns her with Stephen, who is also conscious of his outward existence in terms of a series of roles. Molly and Stephen
both share a capacity for storytelling, scene-setting, and mimicry. Molly’s storytelling and frankness about role-playing evinces her sense of
humor, and it also mediates our sense of her as a hypocritical character. Finally, it is this pragmatic and fluid adoption of roles that enables Molly
CHARACTERS: MOLLY II

In Chapter Eighteen, called "Molly's Soliloquy," Molly is in bed, just on the cusp of sleep. The entire chapter is from Molly's point
of view, revealing Molly's thoughts. She is thinking about her husband, her meeting with Boylan earlier that day (in that very
bed), her past, her hopes. Among other things, she suspects Bloom of having an affair, she thinks of woman's lot in the games of
courting and mating, she thinks of her lovers, and she longs for a glamorous life. She thinks of beauty and ugliness, and her
thoughts are interrupted by a train whistle. She thinks of her past life in Gibraltar and laments the drabness of her present. She
thinks about her health and her daughter, she thinks about her visits to the doctor, and muses about Stephen. Her thoughts turn
to Rudy and Bloom. She thinks of humiliating her husband, she recalls the time when she and Bloom first made love, letting the
reader see she clearly prefers Bloom to Boylan. Punctuation, selection, comment, things usually associated with authorial control,
are missing.There is an ironic comparison between Molly Bloom and with Penelope, who uses her knowledge of the construction
of hers and Ulysses' bed to confirm the identity of her long-absent husband. This chapter begins and ends with the affirmative
Yes. The yeses represent Molly's ongoing optimism to life in general, punctuating the choices she has made and the memories
she has revisited during the entire soliloquy. The yesses also represent Joyce's belief that women are a positive life force, a notion
he was at pains to demonstrate in this remarkable soliloquy. The key here is to be found in Molly's ultimate decision to serve
Bloom breakfast in bed.
CHARACTERS: STEPHEN

The character of Stephen Dedalus is a harshly drawn version of Joyce himself at age twenty-two. Stephen first appeared as the main character of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which followed his development from early childhood to his proud and ambitious days before leaving
Dublin for Paris and the realization of his artistic capabilities. When we meet Stephen again at the beginning of Ulysses, it is over two years after
the end of Portrait. Stephen has been back in Dublin for over a year, having returned to sit at his mother’s deathbed. Stephen’s artistic talent is
still unrealized—he is currently a reluctant teacher of history at a boy’s school. He is disappointed and moody and is still dressed in mourning over
the death of his mother almost a year ago. Stephen’s interactions with various characters in the opening episodes of the book crystallize our
sense of the damaging ties and obligations that have resulted from Stephen’s return to Ireland. At the beginning of Ulysses, Stephen is a self-
conscious young man whose identity is still in formation. Stephen’s aloofness and his attempts to understand himself through fictional characters
such as Hamlet dramatize his struggle to solidify this identity. Stephen is depicted as above most of the action of the novel. He exists mainly
within his own world of ideas—his actions in the world tend to pointedly distance himself from others and from the world itself. His freeness with
money is less a demonstration of his generosity than of his lack of material concerns. His unwashed state similarly reflects his removal from the
material world. His cryptic stories and riddles cut others off rather than include them. He stubbornly holds grudges, and our admiration of his
noble struggle for independence is tempered by our knowledge of the impoverished siblings he has left behind. If Stephen himself is an
unsympathetic character, however, the issues central to his identity struggle are easier for us to sympathize with. From his contemplation of the
eye’s perception of the outside world to his teaching of a history lesson to his meditations on amor matris or “mother love,” Stephen’s mental
CHARACTERS: STEPHEN II

After the first three episodes, Stephen’s appearances in Ulysses are limited. However, these limited appearances—in Episodes
Nine, Fourteen, and Fifteen—demonstrate that Stephen’s attempted repudiation of authority and obligations has precipitated
what seems to him to be the abandonment of all those close to him. At the end of Episode Fifteen, Stephen lies nearly
unconscious on the ground, feeling as though he has been “betrayed” by everyone. Never before has Stephen seemed so much
in need of a parent, and it is Bloom—not wholly father nor mother—who cares for him.

Though Stephen plays a part in the final episodes of Ulysses, we see less and less of his thoughts as the novel progresses (and,
perhaps not coincidentally, Stephen becomes drunker and drunker). Instead, the circumstances of the novel and the apparent
choices that Stephen makes take over our sense of his character. By the novel’s end, we see that Stephen recognizes a break with
Buck Mulligan, will quit his job at Deasy’s school, and has accepted, if only temporarily, Bloom’s hospitality. In Bloom’s kitchen,
Stephen puts something in his mouth besides alcohol for the first time since Episode One, and has a conversation with Bloom, as
opposed to performing as he did earlier in the day. We are thus encouraged to understand that, in the calm of the late-night
hours, Stephen has recognized the power of a reciprocal relationship to provide sustenance.
CHARACTERS:STYLE & TECHNIQUE
Ulysses is an experimental novel in the modernist tradition. It uses parody in its imitation of The Odyssey. It also uses satire and burlesque in
ridiculing religion, culture, literary movements, other writers and their styles, and many other people, places, things, and ideas. The author writes
in third-person point of view with frequent use of allusions, symbols, Jungian archetypes, literary archetypes, pastiche, and the stream-of-
consciousness technique, all of which make the novel difficult to comprehend. In stream of consciousness, the author portrays a character’s
continuing “stream" of thoughts as they occur, regardless of whether they make sense or whether the next thought in a sequence relates to the
previous thought These thought portrayals expose a character’s memories, fantasies, apprehensions, fixations, ambitions, rational and irrational
ideas. In the last chapter of the novel,(in 8 long paragraphs) Joyce omits punctuation entirely in order to mimic the uninterrupted flow of
thoughts. Joyce also uses many phrases from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian etc. In addition, he uses refined language, vulgar
language, slang and demotic dialogue, gibberish, coined words such as noctambules for night walkers and circumjacent for surrounding closely,
passages in all-capital letters, unpunctuated sentences, and abbreviations Another technique he uses is to combine two words into one to create
a single adjective and sometimes a noun. Examples are the following: dangerouslooking, hocuspocus, deepmoved, muchtreasured,
rosegardens.He also writes one chapter in the format of a stage play, another in the format of a Roman Catholic catechism, and another in
language ranging from Old English to modern English. All of these stylistic and technical devices, and many more, help Joyce to depict his world as
multifarious, like the motley-coated world of Homer's Odyssey, with all of its strange peoples and unfamiliar climes. But, of course, Joyce's world
is mundane Dublin, reductio ad absurdum.
OVERVIEW

Ulysses, by Irish writer James Joyce, first published in book form in 1922. Stylistically dense and exhilarating, it is generally regarded as a
masterpiece of Modernism, while others hail it as the pivotal point of Postmodernism. Perhaps the most notable of the works of analysis is The
novel is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey. All the action of Ulysses takes place in and immediately around Dublin on a single
day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser and his wife, Moll, are
intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses (Odysseus), and Penelope, respectively, and the events of the novel loosely parallel
the major events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. While the allusions to the ancient work that provides the scaffolding for
Ulysses are occasionally illuminating, at other times they seem designed ironically to offset the often petty and sordid concerns that take up much
of Stephen’s and Bloom’s time and continually distract them from their ambitions and aims. The book also conjures up a densely realized Dublin,
full of details, many of which are—presumably deliberately—either wrong or at least questionable. But all this merely forms a backdrop to an
exploration of the inner workings of the mind, which refuses to acquiesce in the neatness and certainties of classical philosophy. Although the
main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humour, the book is most famous for its use of a variant of the
interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce sought to replicate the ways in which thought is often seemingly
random and to illustrate that there is no possibility of a clear and straight way through life. By doing so, he opened up a whole new way of writing
fiction that recognized that the moral rules by which we might try to govern our lives are constantly at the mercy of accident and chance
encounter, as well as the byroads of the mind. Whether this is a statement of a universal predicament is throughout held in a delicate
balance.Bloom is Jewish, and is thus an outsider even—or perhaps especially—in the city and country he regards as home.
OVERVIEW

James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, remains one of the most challenging and rewarding works of English literature. Not only does it narrow its temporal
focus to a single day, it also widens its scope to follow three major characters—Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom—and even the city of Dublin
itself. Stylistically, Ulysses is unique not only because it changes style with every episode, but because the narrative refuses to remain obedient to the story; it
increasingly peels away from the plot and indulges in independent raillery of the reader over the heads of the characters. The narrative “wanders” in a way that
celebrates the craft, humor, and meaning of exploration, thereby resembling other famous wanderers: Odysseus, Bloom, the Jews, and Bloom’s simultaneously
adulterous and faithful wife, Molly.

Ulysses stands as an inventive, multiple-point-of-view (there are eighteen) vision of daily events, personal attitudes, cultural and political sentiments, and
observations of the human condition. It is written in a number of differing literary styles, ranging from internal monologue to first-person speculation to
question-and-answer from a catechism to newspaper headlines. The work has eighteen chapters. When taken in context with James Joyce's grander design for it
(a playful comparison to Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey), Ulysses gains complexity, irony, and dramatic intensity. Not only does Stephen Dedalus become all
the more vivid because of his comparison to Telemachus, the son of Ulysses, King of Ithaca, in the Homeric epic. The other main character, Leopold Bloom, may
be seen as the wandering Ulysses. In The Odyssey, Ulysses is seen returning to his wife, that symbol of womanly and cultural virtue, Penelope; in the novel, Joyce
uses irony to represent Penelope as Molly Bloom, who that very afternoon had an adulterous encounter with her lover, Blazes Boylan.

Incidents in the novel have counterparts in the Homeric epic, sometimes to a broadly farcical effect, other times to a more punning or humorous effect, and still
others to fit Joyce's own sense of social or political irony.
PLOT .PART I: THE TELEMACHIAD (THE BOOK OF TELEMACHUS)

ART I: THE TELEMACHIAD (THE BOOK OF TELEMACHUS)

1. Telemachus (pp. 3-19) 8:00 a.m., at the Martello tower at Sandycove (on the shore of Dublin Bay, 7 miles southeast of the
center of Dublin).
Stephen Dedalus, in part a self-portrait of the author, has just returned to Ireland from his studies in Paris. He shares lodgings with
a medical student, Buck Mulligan, in the Martello tower at Sandycove, and the book opens with a rooftop exchange between
Stephen and the irreverent Mulligan. Stephen has been kept awake by the nighttime ravings of Mulligan’s friend Haines, an
Englishman with bad dreams, and wants to know when the latter is leaving. He also complains to Mulligan about his distasteful
comment on the recent death of Stephen’s mother. The two then go downstairs for breakfast with Haines. They leave the tower
together for the swimming hole, where Mulligan, like a good usurper, asks the work-bound Stephen for his key and some money
and sets a date for them to meet at half-past noon.
2. Nestor (pp. 20-30) 10:00 a.m., at Mr. Deasy’s school for Protestant boys
We find Stephen at work attempting, with little optimism or success, to teach a history class. As the apathetic and unruly bunch
quickly disperses for hockey, a lone lingerer named Sargent makes his cautious way to the teacher’s desk for help with his
arithmetic, and Stephen sees in the boy a pathetic portrait of his own youth. Then Stephen suffers his turn as pupil, receiving along
with his salary a tedious lecture from the pompous Mr. Deasy, who then enlists Stephen’s help in getting a tedious letter of his
published in the press.
3. Proteus (pp. 31-42) 11:00 a.m., at Sandymount Strand (the beach near the mouth of the river Liffey).
Stephen wanders the beach, thinking of his past, his family , and the constant change and uncertainty of life. He knows he is
seeking something, something that cannot be found in family life, in intellectual pursuits, but he still does not know what that
something is. Stephen realizes the difficulty of connecting with other people, but also senses that he is part of the cycle of life and
death. He sees this in the movement of the ocean.
PLOT .PART I: THE TELEMACHIAD (THE BOOK OF TELEMACHUS)

4. Calypso (pp. 45-57) 8:00 a.m., at Leopold and Molly Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street, Dublin.

We finally meet Odysseus himself in his modern manifestation as Leopold Bloom, an endearing unheroic 38-year-old Dublin-born Jew of
Hungarian ancestry who canvasses newspaper advertisements for a living. We see him first at home and follow him on his domestic morning
chores, buying himself a kidney at the butcher’s, delivering to his wife Molly a breakfast in bed with the morning mail (including, he notices, a
note from her impresario Blazes Boylan.. Back down in the kitchen he reads a letter from their daughter Milly, then visits the outhouse in great
detail before finally embarking upon his long-day’s wandering through the city on business, pleasure, respectful attendance at Dignam’s funeral,
and the pursuit of not being at home when his wife’s lover calls.

5. Lotus-Eaters (pp. 58-71) 10:00 a.m., at various spots: Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Westland Row post office, and Leinster Street baths.

Bloom visits the post office under his pseudonym Henry Flower to pick up a letter from his sentimentally amorous pen pal “Martha Clifford.” On
his way to read the letter he bumps into the tiresome McCoy, whose conversation he suffers long enough to indulge himself in a pleasant
voyeuristic distraction concerning an attractive woman boarding a carriage across from them. McCoy notices Bloom’s mourning attire and learns
of Paddy Dignam’s funeral, asking Bloom to put his name down as having attended. McCoy out of the way, Bloom reads the letter, then allows
himself a few minutes’ repose in All Hallows church where, watching the service, he muses upon religion to humorous ironic effect. On his way
out Bloom decides to make use of the little time left before the funeral to get Molly’s lotion from the chemist. He buys a bar of soap for himself
and walks towards the baths. He is interrupted by Lyons, who asks to see Bloom’s newspaper to look up a horse running that day. Lyons mistakes
Bloom’s offer to give him the paper— “I was going to throw it away”—as a tip on the “dark horse” Throwaway.

6. Hades (pp. 72-95) 11:00 a.m., at Prospect Cemetery in Glasnevin, north of Dublin.

Bloom’s odyssey through Dublin continues now by carriage (accompanied by Cunningham, Power and Stephen’s father Simon Dedalus) to the
PLOT. PART II: THE ODYSSEY (THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES)

8. Lestrygonians (pp. 124-150) 1:00 p.m., at Davy Byrne’s Pub and the National Museum.
The subject of food and eating is explored here with the detailed attention afforded death and decomposition two episodes ago. We follow
Bloom through a panoply of lunchtime noises and smells and their associations in search of an aesthetically satisfying bite. Along the way, he
bumps into Josie Breen, who updates him on the unpleasant status of her own life with her lunatic husband. Bloom also learns from her about
Mina Purefoy, who’s been in the maternity hospital three days already, and demonstrates his characteristic empathy. Feeling relaxed and
satisfied from a cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne’s, he takes a walk, helps a blind man cross the street, and ducks into the
National Museum (to avoid bumping into his wife’s prospective lover).
9. Scylla and Charybdis (pp. 151-179) 2:00 p.m., at the National Library.
Meanwhile, not far from Bloom, we find Stephen at the National Library, hard at work selling his Hamlet theory to another hardworking group
of literati. Shakespeare, it is suggested, was father not merely of his own children but of his own grandfather, a ghostly father of all his race.
Stephen sees Shakespeare’s work, pervaded as it is by the themes of usurpation, adultery and exile, as an art born from the anguish of
impotence. The quasi-Socratic dialogue, pitting Aristotle (Stephen) against his teacher Plato (the mystic A. E. Russell), is interrupted by the
spirited arrival of the profane Mulligan, who has just come through the Museum, where he noticed Bloom.
10. Wandering Rocks (pp. 180-209) 3:00 p.m., along the streets of Dublin.
This episode comprises nineteen separate passages, each a short poetic sketch of a scene or event happening somewhere in Dublin. Some of
these episodes, though seemingly unrelated, appear to be happening simultaneously, affording the reader the sense of a wide-angle lens
through which the whole city may be viewed. This unification of disparate elements is effected the more tellingly by the culminating scene,
wherein a viceregal procession is depicted as observed by many of the characters individually portrayed.
PLOT. PART II: THE ODYSSEY (THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES)

11. Sirens (pp. 210-239)About 4:00 p.m., at The Concert Room (saloon at the Ormond Hotel).
Musical logic dictates the structure, sense and exhilaration of this episode, which begins with an overture (composed, as in traditional opera, from themes, motifs, and
highlights of the action to come) and proceeds through a fugal handling of voices, ideas, taps of a blind man’s cane, and nostalgic wisps of sentimental song. We follow Bloom
into the Ormond Bar where he witnesses Boylan flirting with the Sirens (the seductive barmaids Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy) before departing for his conquest of our hero’s
wife. Bloom’s impotence to intervene and prevent his cuckoldry, together with his fascination with his adversary, skillfully maintains a subtle but pervasive tension and a
haunting poignance.
12. Cyclops (pp. 240-283) 5:00 p.m., at Barney Kiernan’s pub.
One of the funniest chapters of a supremely funny book, “Cyclops” maintains its ironic humor with the help of a thoroughly unreliable narrator—a bitter, petty barfly equipped
with a sardonic outlook and an exquisite sense for the cliché. The “I” narrator’s account is interrupted by the voice of another narrator—one countering “I”’s vigorous deflations
with equally preposterous inflations (in the form of amusing descriptions of Rabelaisian proportions). Among those so described is “the citizen,” a worn-out patriotic bigot in an
eyepatch who plays Polyphemus to Bloom’s Odysseus. Jewish Bloom finds himself in unwelcome territory in this drunken den of nationalist bigotry. Distracted over the scene he
imagines (correctly) to be transpiring at his home, Bloom allows himself to be drawn into an argument with the anti-Semitic “citizen.” Even Bloom’s very presence in the pub is
misunderstood. He has come to meet Cunningham so that the two of them can visit Dignam’s widow with an offer of help; yet he is perceived as having come only to collect his
winnings on Throwaway. Finally, when Bloom fails to pick up a round of drinks, the atmosphere of suspicion about him ignites into a confrontation over nationalism and
intolerance given in comically cosmic dimensions, and our hero is whisked away from catastrophe by Cunningham “like a shot off a shovel.”
13. Nausicaa (pp. 284-313) 8:00 p.m., at the rocks on Sandymount Strand.
We return to the beach that served as stage for Stephen’s earlier musings and finds Bloom there pondering his perception (markedly less theoretical) of young Gerty MacDowell
and her underwear. Even less concerned with philosophy is Gerty, who gleans she is the object of [a] man’s desire and happens to be quite busy living up to her objectification.
When her group runs off in pursuit of the nearby fireworks display, she stays behind, soaking up the male gaze and feeding it with more and more view of leg until the exploding
Roman candles overhead mimic Bloom’s ejaculation. Meanwhile, anthem-like strains of organ and men’s voices are heard emanating from a nearby church to remind us there is
a temperance retreat in progress. When Gerty gets up from the rock and lamely limps away, we are left with Bloom alone on the dim-lit beach in a guilt-tainted
postmasturbatory reverie, reflecting on women and sexuality with his characteristic concreteness, providing a complementary foil to Gerty’s ruminations on the subject.
PLOT. PART II: THE ODYSSEY (THE WANDERINGS OF ULYSSES)

14. Oxen of the Sun (pp. 314-349)10:00 p.m., at the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street.
Bloom continues his circuitous avoidance of home, hearth and Blazes Boylan by paying a call on Mina Purefoy, whom he knows to be
experiencing a difficult birth. At the hospital he runs into a group of young carousers including Stephen, who happens to be avoiding
his homecoming as well on account of his own problem with usurpers. Bloom once again finds himself to be an outsider looking in on
an unwelcoming society. His concern for the well-being of his surrogate (spiritual) son, Stephen, prompts him to linger on well past the
delivery of the baby until the doctor is free to leave with the gang for the nearest pub. The language in which the episode lives creates
a masterful portrait of the English language itself, evolving as it does from the highly convoluted and ponderous Latinate and Saxon
stages through the various centuries of signature literary styles to the jargon-riddled commercial babble of modernity, perhaps the
worse for wear with the help of an escalating rate of intoxication.
15. Circe (pp. 350-497)12:00 midnight, at Bella Cohen’s Brothel, Tyrone Street (in the red-light district Joyce called “nighttown”).
In keeping with the late hour, high blood alcohol level, and magical powers of Homer’s Circe, this episode is expressed largely in a
hallucinatory manner that invites comparison with the metaphoric power of dream logic. Bloom and Stephen move freely in and out
of a sorceress’ world, where personages and fears from their recent and distant pasts are made manifest to them in a seamless
process of metamorphosis, and put down on the page in dramatic form, replete with stage directions. Stephen heads for the red-light
district and is followed by Bloom, who is concerned in a fatherly way over Stephen’s well-being. In the house of Bella Cohen, Bloom
flirts with Zoe, falls under the spell of the whoremistress Bella, and keeps watch over Stephen, who, after a traumatic hallucinatory
visit from his deceased mother, attempts to break her hold on his psyche by smashing his walking stick against Bella’s chandelier.
Bloom pays Bella for the damage and follows Stephen into the street. Stephen is punched by a British solder unimpressed by Stephen’s
rhetorical skills, and Bloom protects the unconscious recipient of that punch so that the latter might avoid falling into the custody of
the police. The episode (and with it Part II, the “Odyssey” proper) ends poignantly with Bloom’s vision of his own son Rudy (who had
died eleven years ago at the age of eleven days) as he might have been in life, now eleven. By associating Rudy with Stephen at this
point, the image powerfully reinforces the book’s undercurrent theme of father and son in search of each other.
PLOT. PART III: NOSTOS (THE HOMECOMING OF ULYSSES)

16. Eumaeus (pp. 501-543)1:00 a.m., at the cabman’s coffeehouse shelter beneath the Loop Line bridge.
Bloom escorts the revived Stephen to a nearby cabman’s shelter in hopes of sobering the young man up and bringing him home to Eccles Street for a
good night’s sleep. The shelter is run by a reputed ex-Invincible known as “Skin-the-Goat,” whose clientele are being entertained by the tattoos and tall
tales of a sailor named Murphy, just back with a fresh batch of rare exploits on the ship Stephen watched that morning from the strand. Bloom’s best
efforts at communication with his newfound spiritual son are met with certain disappointments, beautifully emphasized by the episode’s narrative
technique, a prose style so hopelessly laden with subordinate clauses, derelict predicates, tireless wandering constructions, and delicious clichés that
the reader yearns for bedtime more keenly than do the protagonists. Nevertheless, our hero is triumphant in his mission, and eventually leads the
young bard through the vicissitudes of city life and tired language to safe harbor at Eccles Street.
17. Ithaca (pp. 544-607)2:00 a.m., at Bloom’s house (same as 4).
Bloom remembers he had forgotten to remember to take his key. Through the bird’s-eye vantage afforded by a loftily impersonal third-person narrative,
we watch Bloom climb over the railing and into the house to receive Stephen for a friendly cup of cocoa and conversation, a refused offer to stay the
night, and a cordial parting urination together beneath the stars. After Stephen leaves, Bloom finds his way to bed past rearranged furniture,
remembrances of his past life with his adulterous wife, and crumbs from the jar of potted meat brought that afternoon by the usurper of his conjugal
bed. Brushing away his predecessor’s crumbs, the returning hero climbs into bed, head to his wife’s feet, boldly orders himself an unprecedented
breakfast in bed (as we learn in the next chapter), metaphorically vanquishes an imagined host of her suitors, and then plants a kiss on her plump
behind before his embarkation for the Kingdom of Hypnos down into a tiny blot of unconsciousness in the space of a dot on the page.
18. Penelope (pp. 608-644)Probably 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. (though unspecified).
The world is Molly’s now; rather, Molly is the world now, and through the massive, evershifting sea of liquid prose that constitutes her monologue, we
explore the yet-unseen sides of things limned throughout the book from other, largely male, perspectives. Washing up on shore from this freely-flowing
tide of words (eight unpunctuated sentences totaling some nearly sixteen-hundred lines) are countless gems of insight into the psyche of Molly,
Woman, and the world. Beginning with her surprise over Bloom’s breakfast order and some random remembrances of life with her husband, she
proceeds in reverie over her recent tryst, before seeing it in the context of her past and future life. Molly’s review of her marriage and family, and
before that her childhood on Gibraltar, gives way by turns to amusing ambivalent appraisals of men and women, as well as flights of romantic curiosity
about younger men, like Stephen, before building to a great peroration of sustained lyrical sweep in affirmation of the pervasive power of love, of the
reality of loss, and, yes, of her ultimate acceptance of the man she married (or at least the man he was when she married him). Yes .