Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ulysses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging
Literature, Meaning, and Perspective
Love and Sex
Fate vs. Free Will
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy
Irish Identity and Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
This episode consists of nineteen short sections narrating the adventures of different characters around Dublin. Often, moments from these scenes break into one another, randomly disrupting the flow of the narrative with unrelated action. The first scene focuses on the reverend John Conmee, who leaves the church at 3 PM with a letter about Dignam from Martin Cunningham. He blesses a begging sailor with one leg and briefly chats with a parliamentarian’s wife in Mountjoy Square. He greets three schoolboys and asks them to post the letter for him. Meanwhile, a half-mile away, the colorfully-dressed dancing professor Denis Maginni passes Lady Maxwell.
Named after a series of moving rocks that frequently destroy ships in the Odyssey, “Wandering Rocks” is a welcome break for the weary reader who has just managed to finish half the novel’s episodes. But it’s also an important microcosm of the novel as a whole. Its structure (nineteen short fragments) plainly comments on the structure of the novel as a whole (which consists of eighteen episodes, most of which are distinct enough to essentially stand alone as short stories). But just as different episodes can portray the same memories, events, characters, and moments in time, “Wandering Rocks” jumps around among simultaneous events in order to emphasize their interconnectedness. In this sense, it’s the clearest example of parallax storytelling in Joyce’s novel: it shows Dubliners looking at the same time and place from a series of different perspectives (like Father Conmee and Denis Maginni’s), which produce a series of different portraits as a result. It also allows Joyce to show off his incredibly detailed knowledge of Dublin (down to transit times) and explore the possibilities of his unconventional narrator. This narrator not only knows everything that’s happening in Dublin, but also can switch perspectives and move time forwards and backwards at will.
Themes
On his walk, Father Conmee sees the polite old Mrs. M’Guinness in her carriage, then he passes two churches and a number of local businesses, like H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlor, where Corny Kelleher works. He salutes the parlor’s owners and patrons. Conmee boards a tram on Newcomen Bridge and silently wishes the other passengers would be cheerier. An old woman struggles to get off the tram, and Conmee thinks about how to Christianize as many “black and brown and yellow men” as possible.
The Catholic priest Father Conmee symbolizes Dublin’s respected old guard, both because of his role at the All Hallows church and because he clearly seems to know everyone in town. Thus, his journey through Dublin represents traditional sources of institutional power. Of course, he also conducts this journey on a tram, the greatest symbol of Dublin’s transformation into a modern capitalist metropolis, and his thoughts are almost absurdly orthodox, so it’s reasonable to think that Joyce is making fun of him and suggesting that he’s a relic of an obsolete past.
Themes
Father Conmee gets off the tram at Howth Road and thinks about the Countess of Belvedere, who may or may not have committed adultery with her husband’s brother. He concludes that people simply can’t know why God would make the “tyrannous incontinence” of sex. He wishes he lived in the past, when men of his profession were taken seriously. He watches the clouds and reads Latin prayers. A man and woman emerge from a bush, and the woman pulls a twig out of her skirt. Conmee blesses them, while recognizing them as sinners.
Conmee recognizes that Ireland is moving on without him, and he tries to rebel against modernity by clinging to history. Here, he confronts one of the novel’s major motifs, betrayal, but his response to it is stilted and traditional—it offers no real solution to people like Bloom, Stephen, or Hamlet, who have to decide what to do about betrayal. Conmee views modern life as a kind of fallen world compared to the past. The couple having sex in the bushes represents this fall from grace, as the bushes are likely a vague reference to the Garden of Eden.
Themes
The episode’s second section starts with Corny Kelleher closing the funeral parlor’s account book. He spins around a coffin lid, chews on a blade of hay, and looks out on the street. He watches Father John Conmee get onto the tram at Newcomen Bridge, sees someone toss a coin from an Eccles Street window, and chats with a constable, who mentions seeing “that particular party” the night before.
Father Conmee saw Corny Kelleher in the last vignette, and now the perspective is switched, and Corny Kelleher sees Father Conmee. This episode is full of such interlaced, parallax perspectives. Through this approach, Joyce gives the reader a composite picture of the world through multiple eyes, rather than a single perspective that presents itself as the end-all-be-all. In a relatively minor side-plot, Corny’s meeting with the constable suggests that Bloom was correct to suspect that Corny is a police informant at the beginning of “Lotus Eaters.”
Themes
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In the third vignette, the one-legged sailor walks up Eccles Street, grumbling a song, “For England […] home and beauty.” He passes Katey and Boody Dedalus, Stephen’s sisters, and two street children stare at him. A woman in an Eccles Street House (Molly Bloom) hears the sailor’s song and opens the window to toss the sailor a coin, knocking over a card that says “Unfurnished Apartments” in the process. One of the street children picks up the coin and puts it in the sailor’s cap.
The one-legged sailor who literally sings England’s praises symbolizes how the British Empire has both wounded and brainwashed the Irish. It might not be obvious that the woman who tosses the sailor a coin is Molly Bloom, but this kind of detail is precisely why Joyce offers multiple parallax perspectives: it allows readers to piece together a complete story while also getting a full picture of different people’s limited, flawed perspectives. The “Unfurnished Apartments” card suggests that the Blooms are renting out Milly’s old room.
Themes
In this episode’s fourth scene, Katey and Boody Dedalus arrive home and tell Maggy that M’Guinness wouldn’t take Stephen’s books at the pawn shop. Maggy has two pots boiling, one with laundry and one with pea soup. She serves Katey and Boody the pea soup, which is a gift from Sister Mary Patrick, and explains that their sister Dilly went to see their father. Boody replies, “our father who art not in heaven.” Meanwhile, the religious pamphlet that Bloom threw into the River Liffey in “Lestrygonians” passes under the Loopline Bridge.
This scene paints a gloomy picture of the Dedalus family’s poverty. However, Stephen’s sisters actually seem to be coping with their circumstances better than he is. Boody’s comment about their father Simon suggests that Stephen isn’t the only one who resents his absence and neglect. But when the narration cuts to the “Elijah is coming” pamphlet sailing down the Liffey, it implies that help might actually be on the way.
Themes
In the fifth fragment, Blazes Boylan buys a basket of fruit in Thornton’s shop, hides a bottle and a jar inside, and asks the assistant to send it by tram to a specific address. The Hely’s advertisers walk past. Boylan stares at the young assistant’s chest, seductively takes a red carnation, and asks permission to use the telephone.
This is the first vignette that is not directly connected to the previous one, but it’s still clearly happening at the same time as all the other events in this episode. Even though Boylan is sending a romantic gift to someone—presumably Molly—he’s still flirting brazenly with the assistant. This speaks volumes about his personality: he’s a shameless flirt, not a true romantic, and he probably has little interest in Molly beyond sex and power.
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In the sixth short scene, Stephen chats with the music teacher Almidano Artifoni on the street in Italian. Artifoni praises Stephen’s singing voice and tells him to think about performing professionally. Stephen says thanks and Artifoni runs after a tram, which doesn’t notice him.
Like much of Ulysses, this scene is probably incomprehensible to most readers at first, since it’s in Italian. But Joyce didn’t seem to think this would be a problem. Readers unwilling to translate will miss Stephen turning down yet another potentially lucrative opportunity because of his desire to stay pure as an artist.
Themes
In the seventh section, the secretary Miss Dunne puts aside The Woman in White, a Wilkie Collins novel that she thinks has “too much mystery business.” She types the date, “16 June 1904,” looks at a poster on her wall, scribbles aimlessly, and thinks about her plans for the night. The phone rings: it’s Blazes Boylan, her boss, with a message. She tells him that someone from Sport was looking for him.
Miss Dunne’s boredom, like Molly Bloom’s, is a subtle sign of how Dublin women were confined to the home in the early 20th century and therefore largely unable to partake in all the excitements and pleasures of modern Dublin. Boylan’s comment seems to involve the Ascot Gold Cup, the horserace that could be seen as a metaphor for his competition with Bloom over Molly. There are two other curious details in this short passage: it’s the only place in the novel that mentions the date (“16 June 1904”), and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White was one of the first popular English novels to feature multiple narrators.
Themes
In the eighth vignette, J.J. O’Molloy joins Ned Lambert in the dark St. Mary’s Abbey, where Ned is giving a clergyman (Rev. Hugh C. Love) a tour. Ned calls the church “the most historic spot in all Dublin.” The rebel Silken Thomas led a rebellion at St. Mary’s in the 16th century, and the abbey was also once a bank and a synagogue. (Now, it’s a warehouse for storing grain.) The clergyman asks if he can bring a camera on his next visit, and Ned agrees. Oddly, the narrative jumps to a bearded man (John Howard Parnell) looking at a chessboard. Then, the clergyman thanks Ned and leaves. Ned tells O’Molloy that the clergyman is writing a book on the powerful Fitzgerald family. Again, the narrative jumps around, this time to the image of the young woman pulling a twig off of her skirt. On the way out of the Abbey, Ned sneezes and explains that he has a cold.
This seemingly innocent scene is full of significant political overtones. Readers might recall from Dignam’s funeral that Ned Lambert is one of the novel’s few Protestants. Rev. Hugh C. Love is another. Since the Protestant Church of Ireland is closely associated with the British Crown, Love probably isn’t interested in venerating Silken Thomas. The narrator’s jump to John Howard Parnell is significant, because as the brother of Charles Stewart Parnell, he’s the most visible figurehead for the Irish nationalist movement. The abbey’s long history demonstrates that Ireland’s past is more diverse and complex than many of the novel’s fervent Irish nationalists would like to admit.
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In the ninth short section, Tom Rochford shows off his machine for music halls, which shows late-arriving audience members who’s currently performing. The narrative briefly jumps to the lawyer Richie Goulding and an elderly lady in a black skirt separately going to court. Nosey Flynn asks how Rochford’s invention works, while M’Coy and Lenehan leave and chat about how Rochford heroically saved someone who fell into a manhole.
Tom Rochford’s heroism and clever invention are both responses to problems that were relatively new in the early 20th century (with the creation of city-wide sewer systems and rising popularity of variety shows). In “Aeolus,” Professor MacHugh claimed that sanitation systems were the British and Roman Empires’ greatest achievements, so it would be reasonable to view Rochford pulling a man out of the sewer as a metaphor for a hero saving Ireland from British imperialism.
Themes
Lenehan checks on the Ascot Gold Cup in Lyman’s bar and then reports that Bantam Lyons is planning to make a ridiculous bet on a sure loser. The men continue their walk and pass Leopold Bloom buying books on the street. The narrative unexpectedly jumps to young Patrick Dignam buying pork steaks from a butcher shop and the “Unfinished Apartments” card getting returned to the window of 7 Eccles Street. Then, it returns to Lenehan telling M’Coy about groping Molly Bloom in a car on the way back from dinner many years ago. Laughing, Lenehan explains hat Leopold didn’t even realize because he was busy talking about the stars. M’Coy is unimpressed, and Lenehan admits that Bloom is “cultured” and even a bit of an “artist.”
Lenehan is referring to Lyons betting on Throwaway after misunderstanding Bloom when they met in “Lotus Eaters.” But Throwaway’s name practically announces that it’s a poor investment. There is a clear connection between the rapid-fire scenes of Bloom buying books, the Dignam boy walking, and someone (probably Molly) returning the card announcing empty rooms. Namely, by juxtaposing these three scenes, Joyce implies that a fatherless child like the Dignam boy could fulfill the needs of the sonless father Bloom and the childless house at Eccles Street. Like his appearances in “Aeolus,” Lenehan’s lewd behavior towards Molly suggests that he represents the worst kind of Dublin lowlife.
Themes
In the tenth vignette, Leopold Bloom is looking for a novel for Molly. After leafing through a series of options, he settles on Sweets of Sin, a tacky erotic novel about a couple’s love triangle with a man named Raoul. Even Bloom gets excited reading it. Meanwhile, the old lady from the previous fragment leaves the courthouse. Bloom buys Sweets of Sin from the bookseller, who has a horrible cough.
Bloom is fulfilling Molly’s morning request to buy her a new erotic novel. It’s telling that he has to do this for her—apparently, respectable women can’t go out and buy their own books in male-dominated turn-of-the-century Dublin. The love-triangle motif in Sweets of Sin obviously corresponds to Bloom, Molly, and Boylan. This makes it all the more surprising that Bloom enjoys the book.
Themes
In the episode’s eleventh short fragment, Simon Dedalus meets his daughter Dilly outside the Dillon auction house and orders her to fix her poor posture. Dilly asks if he found any money—he says he didn’t, but she knows he’s lying, since she knows he’s been drinking. He gives her a shilling, but when she asks for more, he angrily calls his children “an insolent pack of little bitches.” He eventually offers her two pennies more, and then tells her to meet him at home and walks off. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Dublin, the viceroy’s parade passes through the streets.
This scene gives the reader a much less favorable view of Simon Dedalus than they received in “Hades” and “Aeolus.” Dilly has been waiting at Dillon’s for hours, since Bloom first saw her in “Lestrygonians” and assumed that her family was selling its possessions. Dilly evidently understands her father’s shortcomings just as much as Stephen does, and she seems to know exactly what she is doing, which suggests that this is not the first time she’s had to take care of her sisters while he drinks away the family money.
Themes
This episode’s twelfth section starts with Tom Kernan walking through Dublin and congratulating himself for closing a business deal with a Mr. Crimmins. They discussed the explosion of the General Slocum steamer ship in New York and blamed American corruption for it. Kernan fondly replays their conversation in his mind and remembers how Crimmins admired his coat. The narration briefly cuts from Kernan admiring himself to show Simon Dedalus meeting Father Cowley on the street, then Bloom’s pamphlet floating in the sea, and Denis Breen visiting a new lawyer after John Henry Menton made him wait too long. Kernan appreciates the fine gin that Crimmins gave him, and he thinks about political violence in the past and Ben Dollard singing an old ballad. He narrowly misses seeing the viceregal cavalcade go by.
The General Slocum disaster was a real event that happened on June 15, 1904, the day before Ulysses is set. Joyce’s decision to include it again testifies to his attention to detail and desire to stay as close as possible to reality, especially in this section that depicts a cross-section of Dublin life. While Kernan recognizes that the disaster was tragic, he’s really more interested in saying the right thing and looking good in his expensive coat than the more than thousand people who died. In other words, he lacks the inherent empathy of people like Leopold Bloom. In fact, Kernan’s joy at his business deal is an obvious foil for Bloom’s disappointment at his inability to sell the Keyes ad. This suggests that Bloom is too kind to succeed in Dublin’s clannish, immoral business environment.
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In the thirteenth vignette, Stephen Dedalus looks through the dusty window of a stonecutter’s shop and imagines that precious stones are really stars thrown down from the sky by angels. He compares the stonecutter Russell polishing a gem with himself “wrest[ing] old images from the burial earth.” (The narrative jumps to Florence MacCabe and her fellow midwife walking through Dublin with a bag full of cockles.) Hearing the whirr of a nearby powerplant, Stephen decides to move on and think about the conflict “between two roaring worlds”—the exterior and the interior.
Stephen views gem-polishing through the lens of artistic creation: it’s about uncovering and accentuating natural beauty. His reference to “burial earth” associates this artistic process with resurrecting the dead—which in turn suggests the Christian iconography of Jesus’s resurrection or the Greek concept of metempsychosis. This is clearly related to the midwives pulling living cockles out of the sand (or “burial earth”). His comment about the “two roaring worlds” references the conflict between his humanistic belief in the human individual (which means that he controls his own destiny) and his old religious beliefs in God (which would mean that he doesn’t).
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Stephen walks down the street and stops at a book vendor, hoping he might encounter “one of [his] pawned schoolprizes.” (A flashback shows Father Conmee walking.) Stephen finds a well-worn volume with instructions on “How to win a woman’s love.” Suddenly, Stephen’s sister Dilly appears with an introductory French book that she’s bought for a penny. Stephen panics, feeling that Dilly is “drowning” just like him.
The fact that Stephen’s family pawned away his schoolbooks is a clear indicator of how desperately impoverished they actually are. Again, the flashes of other Dubliners’ days in this episode are far from random: Father Conmee is a significant figure for Stephen because he was the head of Stephen’s school. Thus, the flashback to him suggests that he’s somehow watching over Stephen as he tries to recover the evidence of his schooling (which can be compared to the hunt to uncover beauty through art, or “wrest old images from the burial earth”). The book on winning a woman’s love symbolizes Stephen’s sense of loneliness and despair, especially since he lost his mother (the one woman who loved him). Finally, the metaphor of drowning returns again (recalling the drowning case in the first episode, Reuben J. Dodd’s son, and so on). Here, it represents Stephen’s feeling of despair, poverty, and hopelessness. He worries that Dilly will fall into the same intellectual habits, interests, and professions as him—and that this will doom her to the same despair.
Themes
The fourteenth fragment starts with the scene of Father Cowley meeting Simon Dedalus from the twelfth vignette. Cowley reports that the moneylender Reuben J. Dodd is sending men to intimidate him, but Ben Dollard is coming to help out. Dollard arrives almost at once, and Dedalus makes fun of his trousers while Father Cowley compliments his singing. (At different moments, the narration randomly cuts to Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walking by the Kildare Street Club and Reverend Hugh C. Love leaving St. Mary’s Abbey.) Dollard explains that he’s already settled Cowley’s debts with the landlord, Rev. Love.
It’s ironic that Simon Dedalus is helping Father Cowley overcome his debts when he can’t even get his own family out of poverty. Reuben J. Dodd again appears as a foreboding, vicious, hard-nosed man. Not only is this depiction clearly colored by the anti-Semitism that makes Bloom’s life in Dublin difficult, but it seems that many Dubliners conflate their opinions about men like Dodd with their view of all Jewish people. Since Rev. Love appears in a flashback right before Dollard starts talking about him, it’s evident that Joyce isn’t juxtaposing the action and flashbacks at random. Rather, he’s showing how the people who some characters are considering from the outside also have their own rich interior lives and points of view. Finally, the Catholic Father Cowley owing money to the Protestant Reverend Love is another clear metaphor for the British occupation of Ireland. It also suggests that the clergy is branching out into modern capitalist business schemes.
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In the fifteenth vignette, Martin Cunningham and Mr. Power talk about the Dignam boy’s plight. (The narrative briefly jumps to show Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce looking out from the Ormond Hotel, where they work.) Cunningham says he wrote to Father Conmee. Power suggests asking chemist Boyd for money, but Cunningham rejects the idea. John Wyse Nolan catches up to them, and then the narrative flashes back to Councilor Nannetti, Alderman Cowley, and Councilor Lyon passing one another on the City Hall steps. Nolan tells Cunningham that Bloom has already offered five shillings for Dignam’s son. The men compliment Bloom’s benevolence. Then, the narrative flashes over to Blazes Boylan meeting someone outside a shop.
Cunningham is essentially spearheading the effort to provide for Dignam’s family while they wait for his insurance to pay out. He may be the only man as decent and sympathetic as Bloom in the entire novel. Meanwhile, numerous people whose professions supposedly involve helping others—priests, lawyers, and politicians—don’t seem to be interested in charity. This is how Joyce criticizes what he perceived as the immorality and hypocrisy of public life in Dublin.
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Cunningham slows down to help the assistant town clerk, who is struggling to watch and complains of corns on his feet. The men meet the sub-sheriff, Lord John Fanning, in Cunningham’s office. Fanning also refuses to contribute to young Patrick Dignam’s fund, and so does the assistant, who keeps complaining about corns on his feet. The men hear horses and look outside to see the general governor’s formal procession coming down Parliament Street.
It’s telling that the assistant clerk is happy to get help from Cunningham but unwilling to pay it back by contributing to Dignam’s fund. Again, this shows that, despite his position in public service, he’s more interested in helping himself than helping others. The procession outside the window ties these men’s indifference to Dignam’s family’s suffering to the corruption of British rule in Ireland.
Themes
In the sixteenth fragment, Buck Mulligan and Haines are eating in a restaurant. Buck points to John Howard Parnell, a bearded man looking at a chessboard. They order cakes and Buck jokes that Haines missed out on Stephen’s theory of Hamlet. Haines replies that only mentally unstable people obsess about Shakespeare. (The narrative briefly returns to the one-legged sailor begging for money.) Haines asks what delusion led Stephen astray, and Buck blames Catholic “visions of hell” for blocking him from experiencing “the joy of creation” and thereby ruining his art. Haines comments that this is strange, because there’s nothing of this idea in ancient Irish traditions. Buck jokes that it’ll take Stephen a decade to write anything. At the end of this fragment, the narrative returns to Bloom’s religious pamphlet sailing down the River Liffey.
Haines’s comments about Stephen suggest that he might not have been taking him entirely seriously in the morning, when asking about his Shakespeare theory. John Howard Parnell (independence leader Charles Stewart Parnell’s brother) is sitting in the corner with a chessboard, which may represent him strategizing for Ireland’s future. This is significant because, if Haines represents British colonialism and a vision of Ireland that’s stuck in the past (and synonymous with folklore), Parnell represents the Irish people autonomously building a future for themselves. Buck reasonably explains Stephen’s main conflict in the novel when he says that Stephen’s “visions of hell”—or his philosophical and theological doubts—are getting in the way of “the joy of creation,” which is exactly what Stephen is chasing after throughout the novel. In other words, Stephen’s main conflict is about how to overcome the grief, doubt, and alienation that are blocking him artistically.
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In the short seventeenth vignette, the music teacher Almidano Artifoni walks through Dublin. Behind him are Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell and the blind man whom Bloom helped across the street in “Lestrygonians.” Farrell turns around and eventually knocks into the blind man, who curses at him.
Three eccentric minor characters intersect. All of them are misfits in Dublin: Artifoni because he’s an immigrant, Cashel Farrell because he dresses and walks ridiculously, and the blind man because of his disability. In this sense, they are foils for the novel’s main protagonists, outsiders who could be heroes, just like Bloom and Stephen, but never quite get the chance to have their perspectives included in the book.
Themes
In the episode’s eighteenth section, young Patrick Dignam walks down Wicklow Street with his pound and a half of porksteaks. He doesn’t want to sit with his mourning family members. In a shop window, he sees a poster for a boxing match, but he soon realizes that it’s already over. He walks on and sees a dandy (Blazes Boylan) holding a flower in his mouth and talking to a drunk man (Bob Doran). He runs into other schoolboys and wonders if they see him mourning, or if he’ll get his name in the paper. Patrick isn’t sure how to feel about his father’s death. He remembers the last time he saw his dad, drunk and looking for his boots to go out and drink more, and then on his deathbed. He hopes his dad made it to Purgatory.
Patrick Dignam, Jr. is the mirror image of Stephen Dedalus: his father has died (not his mother) and he is just starting to process it (whereas Stephen cannot stop mourning for his mother). Like Simon Dedalus, Patrick’s father seems to have been an alcoholic who mistreated his family. As a result, Patrick feels that he failed to connect with his dad on some significant level, and while he knows he will never be able to have this connection, he has not fully worked out the consequences of not having a father.
Themes
In this episode’s nineteenth and final section, the Earl of Dudley and his wife drive through Dublin from West to East with their royal cavalcade. The numerous Dubliners they pass react in different ways, ranging from admiration to surprise to indifference. These people include nearly everyone named in this episode, such as Tom Kernan, Reuben J. Dodd, the barmaids Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, Simon Dedalus, Reverend Hugh C. Love, Lenehan and M’Coy, Buck Mulligan and Haines, John Howard Parnell, Dilly Dedalus, John Henry Menton, Denis J. Maginni, Blazes Boylan, Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Patrick Dignam, and the man in the brown macintosh.
While this episode began with a journey representing the church, here it ends with a journey in a perpendicular direction, representing the state. More precisely, these journeys represent the two foreign institutions competing for power in Dublin: the Catholic Church and the British Empire. While other vignettes in this episode only briefly intersected, the viceregal cavalcade seems to encompass absolutely all of them, to the point that it almost looks like Joyce is parodying his own choice of form. Perhaps he’s suggesting that the British are the closest thing to the omniscient narrator with absolute knowledge and control over everyone in Dublin (except maybe the man in the macintosh, who remains mysterious even to them). Or perhaps he just wants to hammer home the point that all his characters are coexisting in the same city at the exact same time, and therefore have different parallax perspectives on more or less the same set of events. Interestingly, throughout the rest of this episode, different simultaneous vignettes intruded on one another, but each essentially gave the reader a private glimpse into the lives of a few Dubliners. But in this final vignette, the novel’s characters become the spectators, because they’re staring at the cavalcade. Thus, the roles switch: the reader is no longer watching the Dubliners, but being watched by them. And the people watching no longer have their own stories and contexts—instead, they’re practically frozen in time.
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