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
Leopold Bloom walks through Dublin, observing the homes, businesses, and people he passes. He thinks about the “police tout” Corny Kelleher and stops to look in the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company shop window. After pulling his white card out of his hat and moving it to his pocket, he imagines lounging in lush, tropical Ceylon, where the Tea Company grows its crop. He compares this to floating in the Dead Sea and remembers learning about physics in school.
In the Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters feed Odysseus’s men lotus, which sedates them and leads them to lose all motivation to continue on their quest. While this doesn’t correspond to any single moment in this episode, it does include numerous allusions to comfort, idleness, and complacency—starting with Bloom’s vision of lounging in Ceylon or floating in the Dead Sea.
Themes
Bloom saunters overs to the post office, where he gives the postmistress his white namecard and receives a letter addressed to “Henry Flower.” He ponders a poster depicting soldiers—which reminds him of Molly’s father—then continues on his way.
The secret identity “Henry Flower” is an obvious play on Bloom’s name. Although he seems like an honest and conventional man, Bloom evidently keeps some secrets. But he’s much better at keeping them than Molly: his prudence in having the letter sent elsewhere and using a fake name contrasts with Blazes Boylan’s total unscrupulousness in delivering a letter directly to Molly, for Leopold to find.
Themes
Bloom runs into his friend M’Coy and they idly chat about Dignam’s funeral. Bloom gets distracted watching a beautiful, well-dressed woman get into a carriage across the street. A passing tramcar interrupts Bloom’s view, and he unrolls his newspaper and casually glances down at an advertisement for Plumtree’s Potted Meat, which makes home “an abode of bliss.” M’Coy comments that his wife, a singer like Molly, might have “an engagement” lined up. Bloom comments on Molly’s coming concert tour and thinks of “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” M’Coy asks to have his name put on the list at the funeral, and then the two men part. Bloom thinks that M’Coy was just making up his wife’s “engagement” so that he could borrow (and never return) a suitcase—he’s done it before. Bloom also reminds himself that Molly is a better singer than M‘Coy’s wife.
M’Coy clearly bores Bloom, who sees through his fibs, scams, and posturing. Bloom’s honesty, relative financial stability, and more successful wife show that he’s generally done better than M’Coy (and many of the other Dubliners he meets throughout the novel). Again, it’s clear that Bloom has a propensity for voyeurism, and this foreshadows the “Nausicaa” episode. Just like the advertisement for Agendath Netaim evoked fertile fruit fields in the holy land, Plumtree Potted Meat promises a happy home to all who eat it. This slogan is clearly saying something about advertising’s ability to manipulate the human psyche and the fundamental human desire to belong and feel at home. Of course, since Bloom works in advertising, the Plumtree slogan is also Joyce’s comment on Bloom’s own marital frustrations at home. Finally, this episode is one of many direct links to Joyce’s first work, Dubliners, in which one of Joyce’s stories described M’Coy’s suitcase scam. While the reference may be obscure to readers who are unfamiliar with Dubliners, it rewards those who dig deep.
Themes
Bloom sees an ad for a performance of Leah tonight, with Mrs. Bandmann Palmer playing the title role. She played Hamlet the night before, which reminds Bloom of Ophelia’s suicide, and then his own father’s. Bloom passes some carriage-horses, whose heads are hiding in their feedbags. He hums “Là ci darem” and makes his way to a quiet part of Cumberland Street, where he pulls out the letter he retrieved at the post office.
Joyce keeps citing artworks that comment on his characters’ predicaments. Leah, a play about a Hungarian Jewish refugee who falls in love with a man named Rudolf, is a direct reference to Bloom’s heritage: his father was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant named Rudolf. Another reference to Hamlet recalls Stephen Dedalus’s existential dilemmas in the opening episodes, and Ophelia is strongly associated with many of the novel’s symbols—flowers, drowning, and the death of the father. Bloom’s revelation about his own father gives more context to his own feelings about his family: with his father and his son’s deaths, his male bloodline has extinguished itself. Of course, Bloom’s brief meditation on death heavily foreshadows the next episode, in which he attends Dignam’s funeral. Finally, “Là ci darem” gestures to the seductive content of his secret letter.
Themes
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There’s a yellow flower inside Bloom’s letter, which is from someone named Martha. She calls Henry Flower a “poor little naughty boy” and asks when they can meet. Bloom puts the flower in his shirt pocket and rereads the letter. He thinks about how Martha’s tone has changed since their first letters, then he tosses away the safety pin holding the letter together and shreds the letter itself. He thinks about how paper can be so significant, like a million-pound check—he calculates how much beer a barman would have to sell to make a million pounds.
Bloom’s infidelity is more cautious and emotional than Molly’s, which turns out to be entirely sexual and not secretive at all. In fact, it seems that Bloom doesn’t even want to meet Martha—he prefers to keep her at a distance and avoid getting too involved. Blazes Boylan later appears with a flower in his shirt, just like Bloom in this scene, which suggests that these serve as a symbol of promiscuity or infidelity.
Themes
Bloom goes inside the All Hallows church. He sees a notice about Rev. Conmee’s sermon and a mission to Africa, then starts thinking about Christians absurdly trying to convert opium-smoking Chinese Buddhists. He stares at stupefied women taking communion from the priest, sits on a bench, and tries to imagine how the women must feel: safe and happy, like they’re joining a big family in the kingdom of God. Bloom remembers Martha first requesting to meet him and watches the priest wash out the chalice, which he compares to Guinness. He sees that the choir is out and remembers when Molly sang in that same church, then he thinks of other church music.
Bloom wanders into a church right after reading his adulterous letter, and surely enough, he continues to blaspheme. His description of Chinese opium smokers and Irish Catholics taking communion both return to the episode’s overarching motif of leisure and idleness. Joyce may or may not agree with Bloom’s suspicion that religion stupefies people into blissful ignorance. While Bloom associates the image of the chalice with alcohol (which is stupefying), the narrative also clearly links it with women and fertility, the underlying concern to which Bloom always keeps returning.
Themes
The congregation stands up, and Bloom follows them. When they kneel down, Bloom sits to watch. The priest starts praying in Latin, but then he switches to English. Bloom sorts through memories of religion: mass, confession, penance, shame, and prayer. The priest finishes his prayer and then leaves. Bloom stands up, realizes that his waistcoat is unbuttoned, and walks out of the church. He remembers that he’s supposed to buy lotion for Molly at Sweny’s pharmacy. While the elderly chemist searches for the right recipe in his prescription book, Bloom looks around at all the shop’s medicines and poisons. He thinks about how the lotion left Molly’s skin so delicate and beautiful. The chemist finds the lotion recipe, but since Bloom forgot to bring a bottle, he has to return later. For now, he buys some soap.
Unlike Stephen, Bloom thinks about the church primarily in terms of its rituals and activities in the world—and not its theological doctrines. Since Bloom is nominally Jewish, but really an atheist, it’s no surprise that he mostly doesn’t understand what’s happening during the services. His visit to the pharmacy could be interpreted as the secular equivalent of a visit to church, because he’s going to buy products that will soothe and comfort him and Molly (just like the congregants go to church for spiritual comfort). He buys the lotion as an act of love for Molly, but it’s unclear whether he has some ulterior motive (like he knows that she’s cheating on him and is somehow trying to win her back).
Themes
On his way out of the chemist’s shop, Bloom runs into Bantam Lyons, who grabs the newspaper from under Bloom’s armpit because he wants to see the listings about the Ascot Gold Cup horserace. Bloom notices Bantam’s filthy fingers and dandruff-covered shoulders, then tells him to keep the newspaper, because he’s “going to throw it away.” Bantam cryptically replies, “I’ll risk it,” and gives the newspaper back to Bloom, who wraps the soap inside and marvels at how Dublin’s youth are wasting their money gambling. Bloom heads for the baths, greeting the porter Hornblower on the way. He imagines seeing his body, and especially his penis (“the limp father of thousands”), float peacefully in the womb-like bathtub.
Like almost every other event in this novel, Bloom’s chance encounter with Bantam Lyons is no coincidence: it has an important effect on the plot and comes back to haunt him later in the day. (One of the horses in the Ascot Gold Cup is named “Throwaway,” and he ends up winning.) Like M’Coy, Lyons is clearly less put-together than Bloom, which hints at Dublin’s difficult socioeconomic situation overall. After meeting the filthy Lyons, it’s only natural that Bloom’s next step is to bathe himself. His vision of idly floating in the tub again recalls the leisurely lotus-eaters in the Odyssey, but also returns to fertility and creation. Like the previous two episodes, then, this episode also ends with basic bodily functions, which are characters’ way of returning back to the natural world.
Themes
