James Joyce’s influential modernist novel Ulysses follows an ordinary man, the Dublin advertiser Leopold Bloom, on the ordinary day of June 16, 1904. Bloom eats breakfast, attends a funeral, fails to place an ad, thinks about his wife Molly’s affair with her manager Blazes Boylan, and gets into a bar fight. In the evening, he meets the novel’s second protagonist, the 22-year-old starving poet Stephen Dedalus, and follows him into Dublin’s brothel district. Of course, Joyce’s novel isn’t really about Leopold Bloom’s day. Fundamentally, it’s about people’s search for a meaningful life in the modern world. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus both feel completely alienated and alone in turn-of-the century Dublin: they don’t get along with their families, nobody appreciates the work they do, and they’re ostracized in the broader community. They spend their day drifting through Dublin, fantasizing about the fulfilling lives they want to live, and looking for a place where they truly feel like they belong. While their urban alienation might be a specifically modern feeling, Joyce suggests that their desire to figure out where one belongs is a powerful, universal feeling that motivates all human beings to go on quests of their own.
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are modern-day exiles: they feel largely disconnected from Dublin society and search in vain for a place where they can fit in. Bloom’s colleagues disrespect him, he fails to sell his ad, and he has few (if any) real friends. As the Jewish son of an immigrant, he also faces prejudice. Similarly, Stephen feels that his calling in life is to explore beauty and truth through literature, but nobody in Dublin takes him seriously, except to try to profit off him. His friends (like the cruel moocher Buck Mulligan) don’t care about him. Meanwhile, he’s drowning in debt and on the brink of starvation. Despite their differing circumstances, Bloom and Stephen share the feeling of being exiled within their own city.
Stephen and Bloom also become alienated from their families and lose control over their homes. After his mother dies and his irresponsible father takes over, Stephen’s family falls into poverty and despair. Stephen leaves home, and his frustration and resentment at his father frequently resurface. For instance, he develops an elaborate theory of Hamlet to suggest that fatherhood is meaningless, even though he’s really just trying to soothe the pain of his own abandonment. Similarly, Bloom struggles to feel that he truly belongs in his family. He’s haunted by his father’s suicide and his infant son Rudy’s untimely death, and he thinks his male bloodline is all but cursed. He desperately wants to have a son, but he’s too afraid of losing another child to even try to have another son. In turn, this fear threatens his relationship with his wife Molly, who has started seeing other men—like Blazes Boylan, her concert manager. Thus, Bloom’s family life is just like his social and professional lives: he finds himself on the outside looking in, desperately trying to make a place for himself. Significantly, both Stephen and Bloom leave home without their housekeys and later find that other men (Buck and Boylan) have usurped their houses, which is a metaphor for the way they become exiles in the spaces where they are supposed to belong (family and society).
Therefore, in Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen’s main concern is how they can overcome their sense of alienation. Concretely, this means that they want to define and claim a place in the world, so that they can feel that they belong somewhere and start to work towards a fulfilling, meaningful life. This is why Joyce links his protagonists to the Odyssey and Hamlet—which also focus on questions of home, belonging, identity, and dispossession. For years, Odysseus struggles to make it home to Ithaca, and he wonders if another man will have taken his place when he arrives. Similarly, Bloom wanders Dublin during the day, charting his course back home and wondering if Molly will leave him for Blazes Boylan. And Stephen struggles to cope with his identity and plan his future after his mother’s death, just like Hamlet after his father’s. Both protagonists also build up elaborate fantasies that represent the happy, fulfilled lives they want: Bloom dreams of becoming a politician, publishing stories in the paper, and of having a joyous, happy family. Stephen imagines himself as a literary Messiah, saving Ireland from ignorance through art. While unrealistic and unachievable, these fantasies show how deeply Bloom and Stephen want to overcome their personal, professional, and social exile.
Bloom and Stephen’s epic journeys intersect halfway through the novel, and although they don’t realize it at first, Joyce makes it clear that the key to their quests is each other. Like a father and son, Stephen and Bloom promise to help each other overcome alienation and establish a more solid identity. Bloom wants to care for a son and fill his house, while Stephen needs a responsible father figure and a place to stay. Bloom wants intellectual stimulation, while Stephen wants someone to take his writing seriously. Thus, Bloom takes a fatherly interest in Stephen, protectively follows him around, and then invites him over. But what happens next is surprising: they don’t get along. Even while the novel repeatedly compares them to the Father and the Son (God and Jesus Christ), Stephen mostly ignores Bloom and looks down on him as intellectually inferior. He refuses to stay at Bloom’s house and wanders off into the night. However, at the end of the novel, it becomes clear that their meeting gives them both the tools they need to resolve their problems individually. After meeting Stephen, Bloom reevaluates his feelings about fatherhood and family, and he starts to reconcile with Molly. Meanwhile, Stephen finally gains the courage and conviction that he needs to dedicate himself to art. Thus, while they do not instantaneously find the sense of belonging that they fantasize about, Bloom and Stephen do overcome their alienation and take the first steps towards fulfilling their desires.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging ThemeTracker
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging Quotes in Ulysses
In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.
Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!
No, mother! Let me be and let me live.
I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal’s, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.
—Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
—Metempsychosis?
—Yes. Who’s he when he’s at home?
—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It’s Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.
—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.
White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.
—Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
A dwarf’s face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was. Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it’s healthy it’s from the mother. If not from the man. Better luck next time.
—Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It’s well out of it.
The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.
—In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.
—But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own life.
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second.
[…]
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand.
[…]
No-one is anything.
Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?
Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.
Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!
Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction.
THE CRIER: (loudly) Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most honourable …
STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (he frowns) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which …
THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t.
STEPHEN: (with an effort) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP: Which?
(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.)
STEPHEN: (abruptly) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!
BLOOM: (mumbles) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,…
BELLO: (with a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice) Hound of dishonour!
BLOOM: (infatuated) Empress!
BELLO: (his heavy cheekchops sagging) Adorer of the adulterous rump!
BLOOM: (plaintively) Hugeness!
BELLO: Dungdevourer!
BLOOM: (with sinews semiflexed) Magmagnificence!
BELLO: Down! (he taps her on the shoulder with his fan) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down!
BLOOM: (her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps) Truffles!
(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)
STEPHEN: (eagerly) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.
STEPHEN: Non serviam!
[…]
(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)
(Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page.)
BLOOM: (wonderstruck, calls inaudibly) Rudy!
RUDY: (gazes, unseeing, into Bloom’s eyes and goes on reading, kissing, smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)
What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?
He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations.
As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received: existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.
What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.
What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.
What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of the past.
What was Bloom’s visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.
What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?
Visually, Stephen’s: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair.
Auditively, Bloom’s: The traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
Supposing I risked having another not off him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly
Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over
I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
