James Joyce’s famously dense and unconventional modernist novel Ulysses follows the advertiser Leopold Bloom as he goes about his day in Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904. Although the novel’s plot is deceptively simple, its structure, style, and literary and historical references are incredibly complex. Leopold Bloom’s quest through Dublin is loosely modeled on Homer’s Odyssey—each of the novel’s eighteen chapters (or “episodes”) roughly corresponds to a book from the Odyssey. But it would be misleading to take this parallel too far and assume that every character, event, and theme in the Odyssey maps directly onto Ulysses (or vice-versa).
The novel’s first three chapters deal not with Leopold Bloom, but with Stephen Dedalus, the twenty-two-year-old starving artist who was the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Similarly, the Odyssey opens with the story of Odysseus’s son Telemachus, rather than Odysseus himself—in fact, the first episode of Ulysses is called “Telemachus.” In this episode, Stephen has breakfast with his roommates, the annoying students Buck Mulligan and Haines. They live in a Martello tower, which Stephen has been renting since he returned from Paris to Dublin to see his dying mother a year ago. He still feels guilty for refusing to pray at her deathbed after losing his faith in God, and his roommates are so intolerable that he decides to find another place to sleep that night.
In the next chapter, “Nestor,” Stephen teaches at a nearby school and collects his monthly wages from Mr. Deasy, the schoolmaster. Deasy loyally defends England’s imperial rule over Ireland and convinces Stephen to help him get a letter about cattle foot and mouth disease published in the local newspaper. In the third episode, “Proteus,” Stephen goes on a long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy as he walks on the Sandymount Strand beach. He contemplates the nature of perception, history, courage, and much more.
The reader first meets Mr. Leopold Bloom in the fourth episode, “Calypso.” Bloom wakes up, buys himself a pork kidney for breakfast, and serves tea and toast to his wife, the concert singer Molly Bloom. In episode five, “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom strolls through Dublin, retrieves a love letter from his secret pen pal Martha Clifford, and wanders into a Catholic service (even though he’s Jewish). In the following chapter, “Hades,” Bloom attends the funeral of his acquaintance Paddy Dignam. While riding through town in a carriage with Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and Simon Dedalus, Bloom sees the “worst man in Dublin”—Blazes Boylan, his wife’s concert manager, who is probably sleeping with her. He also notices a funeral procession for a child, which reminds him of his son Rudy, who died as an infant. During the funeral, Bloom contemplates the nature of death and tries to identify an unfamiliar man in a macintosh raincoat.
In the lively seventh episode, “Aeolus,” Bloom visits Dublin’s newspaper offices to try to set up an ad for a client. The men he meets mostly ignore him, preferring to joke about the day’s news, Irish history, and the Ascot Gold Cup horserace. Stephen Dedalus also visits the offices with Mr. Deasy’s letter, but he narrowly misses Bloom. In episode eight, “Lestrygonians,” Bloom wanders around Dublin, looking for lunch. His mind also wanders: among other things, he contemplates modern technology, advertising strategies, and the meaninglessness of human existence. He pops into Burton’s restaurant, but he can’t stand the beastly sight of men devouring their lunches, so he has a cheese sandwich and glass of wine in Davy Byrne’s pub instead.
In episode nine, “Scylla and Charybdis,” the novel returns to Stephen Dedalus, who is explaining his complex theory about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the poet George Russell and the librarians Lyster, Eglinton, and Best in the Irish National Library. Stephen insists that Hamlet was really an expression of Shakespeare’s bitterness at his adulterous wife Ann Hathaway and his despair at the death of his young son Hamnet. But the librarians reject his theory, and then Buck Mulligan shows up to interrupt Stephen with a series of absurd jokes. Stephen portrays Shakespeare as a vicious Jewish manipulator and declares that fatherhood is meaningless, but he eventually admits that he doesn’t even believe what he’s saying. Stephen and Buck pass “the wandering jew” Leopold Bloom on their way out of the library, narrowly missing him for the second time.
In the second half of Ulysses—episodes ten through eighteen—Joyce takes a series of daring risks with perspective and style. This shift is immediately clear in the tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks,” which consists of nineteen short vignettes set at exactly the same time, in different places around Dublin. Episode eleven, “Sirens,” opens with a sixty-line onomatopoetic overture and is written entirely in a rhythmic, musical style. This reflects its setting: the Ormond Hotel bar, where Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard are singing parlor songs. Blazes Boylan meets his lowlife friend Lenehan in the bar, and Leopold Bloom wanders in to watch them from across the room. At four o’clock, Boylan leaves, and then the novel depicts his car jingling its way through Dublin to meet Molly. Leopold Bloom enjoys the music while writing back to Martha Clifford, then he leaves the bar and runs into the prostitute who took his virginity.
In episode twelve, “Cyclops,” a group of men are drinking and talking about politics in Barney Kiernan’s bar when Leopold Bloom wanders in to meet Martin Cunningham. This chapter introduces an entirely new narrator, a nameless Dublin debt collector. But new voices also repeatedly steal the show from this narrator, taking over the narrative for a page or two at a time. These voices all represent exaggerated stereotypes of different kinds of writing, ranging from ancient Gaelic epics and children’s books to legal contracts. The debt collector and his friend, an aggressive and outspoken Irish nationalist named the citizen, take issue with Bloom’s intelligence, pacifism, and Jewishness. Lenehan adds fuel to the fire by falsely declaring that Bloom won a fortune on the Ascot Gold Cup horserace by betting on the longshot horse, Throwaway. The citizen attacks Bloom, who narrowly escapes in Martin Cunningham’s car.
Episode thirteen, “Nausicaa,” begins with a completely different tone: a young woman named Gerty MacDowell is sitting on the rocks at Sandymount Strand, daydreaming innocently about meeting the perfect man and becoming the perfect housewife. She notices an older man standing nearby, staring at her, and moving his hand around in his pocket. She starts to fantasize about falling in love with him, and when fireworks start going off overhead, she passionately lifts her skirt and shows the man her legs. In fact, the man is Leopold Bloom, and he’s been staring at Gerty and masturbating. In the second half of the chapter, Bloom sees Gerty limp away down the beach and realizes that she’s lame. He thinks about all the women he knows and falls asleep on the rocks.
The novel’s difficult fourteenth episode, “Oxen of the Sun,” is written in a series of different literary styles that represent the whole development of the English language from prehistory to the early 20th century. Joyce closely imitates the prose of more than a dozen major writers, ranging from the 15th-century knight Sir Thomas Malory to the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. In this chapter, Bloom goes to the hospital to visit the family friend Mrs. Purefoy, who is giving birth. But he ends up partying with a group of drunk medical students instead. These students—including Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus, and their buddy Vincent Lynch—drink, sing, and boisterously debate about fertility and abortion. This disturbs Mrs. Purefoy, who is giving birth upstairs.
The fifteenth and longest episode of Ulysses, “Circe,” is actually structured as a play. Set in “nighttown,” Dublin’s red-light-district, this chapter mixes reality, fantasy, and nightmare to the point that it’s often impossible to tell what is real and what is imagined. At the beginning of this chapter, Bloom follow Stephen and Lynch into nighttown out of a feeling of fatherly responsibility. Bloom has visions of his mother, father, wife, and ex-girlfriend Josie Breen berating him, and then he fantasizes about the women he’s sexually harassed (or thought about harassing) taking him to court over his perversions. In a third fantasy, he becomes “emperor-president and king-chairman,” rebuilds Ireland in his own image, and is received as the Messiah by his people.
Back in the real world, Bloom follows the prostitute Zoe Higgins into Bella Cohen’s brothel, where Stephen and Lynch are lounging around with two more prostitutes, Florry Talbot and Kitty Ricketts. Stephen spouts philosophical nonsense about music, Bloom has more visions of friends and family, and Bella Cohen arrives and acts out a domination fantasy with Bloom. When Stephen has a vision of his mother’s corpse, he breaks down and smashes Bella’s chandelier. The men escape the brothel, but outside, Stephen gets into a fight with two English soldiers, Privates Compton and Carr. After he’s knocked to the ground, Bloom helps him to his feet and takes care of him.
In the sixteenth episode, “Eumaeus,” Bloom takes Stephen to rest in a nearby cabman’s shelter, where a sailor named Murphy tells tall tales about his travels. Bloom admires Stephen’s intelligence, shows him a picture of Molly, and tries to offer him fatherly advice (which Stephen ignores). The seventeenth chapter, “Ithaca,” presents Bloom and Stephen’s conversations in the form of a catechism—a detailed series of questions and answers, which are often used to clarify religious teachings. Bloom invites Stephen over to his home, and they chat about music, women, and religion on the walk over. Since Bloom forgot his keys, he has to jump over the fence and enter through his basement. Inside, Bloom and Stephen chat about family and philosophy over cocoa. Bloom offers Stephen his guest room for the night, but Stephen refuses. Bloom closes up the house and goes to bed. He kisses Molly on the butt and they chat about his day. He falls asleep upside-down, with his head at the foot of the bed.
The novel’s famous last episode, “Penelope,” consists of Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness as she falls asleep. Leopold has asked for breakfast in bed, and Molly thinks this is preposterous. She wonders if he is cheating on her, then remembers having extraordinary, athletic sex with Blazes Boylan. She considers having another child, thinks about the men she has loved, and reflects on her childhood in Gibraltar. She gets her period, then remembers when she first fell in love with Leopold and starts to fantasize about Stephen Dedalus. She decides to make Leopold breakfast in bed and “just give him one more chance,” and as she finally falls asleep, her memories of the day Leopold proposed to her mix with her feelings about the men she loved in her youth.
