On their epic journeys through Dublin, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus don’t magically save the day like superheroes. Instead, they spend plenty of time stuck, bogged down in guilt, regret, confusion, and fear. Like most ordinary people, Joyce’s protagonists struggle to cope with things that are out of their control—especially their inability to change the past and their certainty that they will die in the future. In a word, they are grappling with fate, which is the ultimate limit to human freedom. Joyce shows how it’s easy to give up on the struggle between fate and freedom: when they realize that they will face frustrations, fall short of their goals, and eventually die, Bloom and Stephen decide that life is meaningless and resolve not to try in the first place. Joyce thinks it’s necessary for people to accept what they cannot control, so that they do not give up or get discouraged when they fail. But he also affirms that it’s always worth struggling against fate, even when the odds are long.
Throughout the novel, Joyce’s protagonists grapple with fate in ways that range from the absurd to the life-shattering. Leopold Bloom’s everyday frustrations are one of the most humorous and relatable parts of Ulysses. For instance, the newspaper foreman Nannetti doesn’t answer Bloom, and he doesn’t know if he’s being ignored or just overreacting. Later, he forgets to look while crossing the street and nearly gets run over by a tram. In other scenes, he forgets his wife Molly’s lotion recipe and he leaves his key in the wrong pants. Of course, most epic heroes wouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of minor inconveniences—so Bloom’s minor frustrations actually set him up as an imperfect, all-too-human kind of epic hero.
On the other end of the spectrum, the novel’s protagonists also have to confront death, which is the most consequential turn of fate for human beings. Throughout the novel, Stephen grieves for his dead mother, while Bloom grieves for Paddy Dignam, his son Rudy, and his father. In the process, Bloom and Stephen also confront the inevitability of their own deaths. For instance, during “Oxen of the Sun,” a deafening thunderbolt reminds Stephen of his fear of death. Terrified, he briefly considers taking back up religion. During his courtroom fantasy in “Circe,” Bloom gets sentenced to death and tries to escape his fate through metempsychosis. To Stephen and Bloom—like to most people—death is frightening precisely because it’s unpredictable and inescapable. We have no control over when and how we will die, and death will leave our projects incomplete and our goals unfulfilled. Therefore, death is the ultimate expression of fate, and it represents the absolute limit of human free will.
Similarly, other people’s deaths also make our errors irreversible and our transgressions unforgivable. This is why Stephen’s failure to pray for his mother tortures him throughout the novel: he can’t undo his mistake. He knows that time only flows in one direction, and it’s only truly possible to evaluate actions in retrospect. (Joyce uses this principle to manipulate the reader by releasing important details long after they’re needed—for instance, Bloom thinks of his father’s death several times before the novel reveals that he died by suicide.) Therefore, Stephen feels that all decisions are risky and imperfect, and he’s terrified of making another mistake that he will later come to regret. So just like death leads Stephen and Bloom to doubt whether their free will means anything, regret leads them to doubt whether acting is worth the effort at all, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
However, Joyce suggests that the only way to deal with these limits to free will is by fully accepting them and continuing to struggle against fate anyway. At times, fearing death, regret, or error, Stephen and Bloom decide to passively give themselves over to fate instead of taking action. The most obvious examples of this are Bloom’s decision not to have another child (because he’s too afraid to lose it) and Stephen’s decision not to write (because he’s too afraid that the people who surround him will reject his work). They decide not to create what they most want because they’re afraid that fate will snatch it away from them. Put differently, when they realize that their free will has limits, they decide that it’s safer not to act. Other times, they indulge in fantasies in the hopes of forgetting about fate—like when Bloom imagines himself as Ireland’s all-powerful king-emperor during “Circe.”
A third solution to the problem of fate is to deny that free will exists in the first place. This is what Mr. Deasy does in “Nestor,” when he declares that all of history is pre-ordained by God, so there’s no point in trying to do anything. But Joyce expresses his disagreement through Stephen’s famous response: “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Although it may not work, trying to change the world by rebelling against history is still better than not trying at all. For Stephen, this is doubly true because rebellion is at least an affirmation of one’s own freedom, and he values his artistic freedom above all else. Thus, he decides to continue trying to change history, even though he knows that it may not be possible.
Similarly, in the novel’s climax during the brothel scene in “Circe,” Stephen has a vision of his mother rising from the dead, and he tells her “Non serviam!” (“I will not serve!”). With this act of rebellion, he affirms his earlier decision not to pray for her—even though he later came to regret it during the events of the novel. This shows that he manages to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas together: first, that it’s worth struggling against fate even when the odds are long, and secondly, that accepting the inevitability of fate is actually the best way to prepare for the struggle against it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fate vs. Free Will ThemeTracker
Fate vs. Free Will 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.
—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.
After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
—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.
—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.
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.
But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away. […] Heard he then in that clap the voice of the god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must.
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!
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 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.
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.
