Hugh (“Blazes”) Boylan Character Analysis

Blazes Boylan is the brash, flirtatious, and superficial (but extremely popular and successful) Dublin businessman with whom Molly Bloom starts an affair during the novel. He’s also managing her upcoming concert tour, which is the pretense for their meeting on the afternoon of June 16 at the Bloom house. Leopold Bloom considers him the “worst man in Dublin” and thinks about him constantly. Bloom also nearly runs into Boylan several times during the day, almost always right after thinking about him. These close encounters cause Bloom considerable anxiety, but they also spark his curiosity—thus, in “Sirens,” Bloom actually enters the Ormond Hotel bar in order to spy on Boylan. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Boylan leaves the hotel and rides his jingling car all the way to Bloom’s house, where he and Molly have sex. In her soliloquy in the final episode of the novel, Molly reveals that Boylan is extraordinarily well-endowed and incredible in bed. Still, she recognizes that Boylan has no serious romantic intentions: he was essentially just interested in sex, and the most she can hope to get out of him are a few presents during her concert tour. In “Wandering Rocks” and “Sirens,” the reader receives snapshots of Boylan that reinforce this point—he tries to seduce all the women he meets, and his tactics are unsophisticated and obviously insincere. He doesn’t appear to have any greater sense of purpose in life besides immediate gratification, which is a direct contrast with Bloom’s complete moral seriousness. (This is similar to how Buck Mulligan’s jokes and pranks make Stephen Dedalus’s seriousness as an artist stand out.) In fact, the novel is full of comparisons between the two men—for instance, when they enter the Ormond Hotel bar, Lenehan calls Boylan “the conquering hero” and the novel refers to Bloom as an “unconquered hero.” Boylan also loses a considerable sum of money on the Ascot Gold Cup race when the underdog, Throwaway, beats the favorite, Sceptre. This foreshadows the way that Molly definitively rejects Boylan for Bloom at the end of the novel.