J.J. O’Molloy is a brilliant but unsuccessful Dublin lawyer. While he keeps up a façade of respectability, he is secretly drowning in debt and resorting to desperate schemes to try to stay afloat. Unlike many of the novel’s other characters, he seriously believes in Stephen Dedalus’s potential as a writer, and he defends Bloom in the barroom scene in “Cyclops.”
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J.J. O’Molloy Character Timeline in Ulysses
The timeline below shows where the character J.J. O’Molloy appears in Ulysses. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Episode 7: Aeolus
...an overelaborate speech made by the politician and baker Dan Dawson the previous night. J.J. O’Molloy enters the office, and the headline “Sad” comments on his failed career as a lawyer....
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...Crawford jingles his keys around and proposes the newsmen go drink with Lambert and Dedalus. O’Molloy, MacHugh, and Crawford light cigarettes and joke about how the British Empire has subjugated Ireland....
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Stephen’s mind drifts to his poetry, and then to some rhyming Italian lines from Dante. O’Molloy insists that Ireland still has excellent jurists, like Seymour Bushe, who defended the accused in...
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...and rule on the Israelites, who managed to escape bondage by following Moses’s lead. But O’Molloy laments that Moses “died without having entered the land of promise.” Similarly, Stephen thinks that...
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...replies with confusion and disappointment before Crawford repeats what he said. Crawford also rejects J.J. O’Molloy’s request for a loan.
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...for it. Stephen prefers “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums.” O’Molloy looks up at the pillar and smiles at Stephen’s idea that Nelson is a “onehanded...
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Episode 10: Wandering Rocks
In the eighth vignette, J.J. O’Molloy joins Ned Lambert in the dark St. Mary’s Abbey, where Ned is giving a clergyman...
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Episode 12: Cyclops
...praises Boylan’s management. A romantic literary voice praises Molly’s “peerless beauty,” then announces that J.J. O’Molloy and Lambert have entered the bar. The episode’s primary narrator criticizes O’Molloy, who pretends to...
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...to the Irish people. “To hell with the bloody brutal [English],” the citizen proclaims. J.J. O’Molloy and Bloom try to talk the citizen down, but he just gets angrier: he claims...
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The citizen continues to argue with O’Molloy and Bloom. He blames England for degrading Ireland, reducing its population, corrupting the fine products...
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...visiting England and thanking Queen Victoria for giving him a copy of the Bible. J.J. O’Molloy compares this to the Belgian atrocities in the Congo.
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...really does support the nationalists, and Martin says he does. But Lenehan, Alf Bergan, J.J. O’Molloy, and the citizen don’t believe this, and when Martin explains that Bloom’s father was really...
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Episode 15: Circe
The lawyer J.J. O’Molloy defends Bloom, claiming that he’s merely an “errant mortal” and “poor foreign immigrant” trying to...
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O’Molloy continues his defense, arguing that the respectable Bloom treated Driscoll like “his very own daughter”...
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