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Episode 3: Proteus
Themes
and Colors
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
Mr. Leopold Bloom, who loves devouring animal organs, wants kidneys for breakfast. He prepares buttered bread and tea for his wife, then turns to the meowing cat, who is asking for milk. Bloom marvels at her cunning and wonders how she perceives the world. She probably sees Bloom like a tower. She blinks her green eyes, and he pours her milk from the jug that the milkman just filled up. Bloom decides to buy a pork kidney from the butcher Dlugacz, so he climbs the stairs to tell his wife that he’s running out for a minute and ask if she wants breakfast. Half-asleep, she says “Mn” (“no”) and rolls over, causing the brass rings on the bedstand to jingle.
In this fourth episode, the novel abruptly shifts to center its main protagonist, Mr. Leopold Bloom. In the Odyssey, Calypso was the goddess who held Odysseus captive on her island for seven years. In Ulysses, Calypso loosely corresponds to Molly in this episode, but is also just a reference to the starting point of Bloom’s journey. Notably, many of the symbols from the first episode recur in this opening scene—like tea and milk, the tower, and emerald-like flashes of green. While these symbols clearly tie the two episodes together, Bloom’s view of the world could not be more different from Stephen’s. Notably, Joyce’s third-person narrator also changes to resemble Bloom’s light, curious, whimsical perspective. Although he likes to devour their organs, Bloom is also remarkably kind to animals—he’s obviously an empathetic and caring man. Molly’s first word, “mn” (her grumbled way of saying “no”), foreshadows the end of the novel, when her final word, “Yes,” suggests that she has transformed. Finally, the bedstand’s jingling rings foreshadow the jingling sound that later gets associated with Blazes Boylan, the man with whom Molly goes on to have an affair.
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Bloom checks for his secret piece of paper inside his hat and his lucky potato in his pants pocket. His key is in another pair of pants, but he doesn’t want to disturb his wife by searching for it, so he goes out and leaves the door open. He notes the sun striking the church and predicts that it’ll be a hot day, especially in the black suit he has to wear. As he walks through Dublin, he imagines visiting an exotic city in the East, at least the way it’s depicted in books.
Just like Stephen, Bloom leaves without the key to his own home. This foreshadows the way that—again, just like Stephen—he will soon see his home usurped by a traitor. Outside on the street, Bloom is attentive to small details in the world around him, but his kind of awareness is also remarkably different from Stephen’s. Whereas Stephen focused on sounds and let them spiral out into thoughts and theories, Bloom is more attuned to sights and physical sensations, and his interest in them is practical. Thus, while Bloom is also clearly a thoughtful and educated man, his concerns are essentially worldly and external, while Stephen’s are fundamentally mental, spiritual, and internal.
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Passing Larry O’Rourke’s bar, Bloom remembers that O’Rourke never wants to buy ads and how Simon Dedalus imitates him. He considers discussing Dignam’s funeral, but just bids O’Rourke “good day” instead. Bloom wonders how barmen like O’Rourke make a living and starts calculating his sales, but gets distracted when he reaches Dlugacz’s window, which displays sausages and one last kidney. His neighbor’s serving-girl is there, buying sausages, and he remembers the way her skirt swings around when she hits a carpet on a clothesline. Bloom looks at a newspaper ad for a cattle farm, and since he hopes to gawk at the serving-girl on her way home, he rushes to buy his kidney. He evades Dlugacz’s gaze and quickly says goodbye, but the girl is already gone.
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Bloom walks home, reading a newspaper ad for Agendath Netaim, a company selling fruit fields in Israel. He thinks of old friends, passes a man he vaguely remembers, and notices a cloud passing in front of the sun, which makes him think of darker imagery, like the desert, the Dead Sea, and Sodom and Gomorrah. An old woman crosses in front of him, reminding him of the horrible inevitability of death. But he concludes that he’s just having a bad morning. He observes the other houses beside his on Eccles street, and the sunlight returns.
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Inside Bloom’s house, a card and two letters are waiting. There’s a letter for Bloom from his daughter Milly, and a letter in suspicious handwriting and a card for his wife Molly. Upstairs, Molly hides the letter under her pillow and asks Leopold (“Poldy”) for tea. Bloom boils tea, fries the pork kidney with pepper, and gives its bloody wrapping paper to the cat. He scans his letter from Milly, drinks his tea out of a cup she gave him for his birthday, and remembers her happy childhood.
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Leopold Bloom brings Molly breakfast in bed and asks about her letter, which is from Boylan, the man who organizes her concerts. She’ll be singing “Là ci darem” (a duet from Don Giovanni) and “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” She points Leopold to the foot of her bed; he retrieves her underwear, but she’s actually asking for a book. She’s marked a word she doesn’t understand: “metempsychosis,” which Leopold defines as “the transmigration of souls,” or reincarnation. The book is a circus-themed erotic novel that reminds Bloom of trapeze accidents, death, reincarnation, and Dignam’s funeral. Molly reports that the novel wasn’t “smutty” enough, and she asks for a Paul de Kock novel instead. Leopold briefly explains reincarnation to Molly, in the process glancing at the picture of a naked nymph above their bed, which reminds him of her.
Molly smells smoke from the kitchen, and Bloom rushes downstairs to serve himself the slightly burned kidney with tea and bread dipped in gravy. He reads Milly’s letter in full: she thanks her parents for her 15th birthday present, lovingly writes that her photography studies are going well, and mentions a boy named Bannon who sings Boylan’s “seaside girls” song. Bloom remembers when Milly was born and laments that his and Molly’s son, Rudy, died as an infant. He rereads the letter and wonders about her inevitable sexual awakening.
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The cat meows at the door, hoping to go outside, but Bloom has to go to the bathroom first. He grabs an old newspaper and heads out into the garden, which he thinks about redoing on his way to the outhouse. Inside, he sits and starts to do his business while reading Philip Beaufoy’s Titbits newspaper’s prizewinning story, “Matcham’s Masterstroke.” He smartly skims the beginning and end, and he thinks he could write a winning story, too. He thinks about Molly getting dressed the morning after she met Blazes Boylan. He’s done, so he tears apart the winning story and wipes himself with it. Leaving the outhouse, he hears the church bells ring 8:45 AM and thinks about “Poor Dignam!”
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