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now restores the balance by giving
Molly her own voice. Allowing
his female protagonist to have
the last word (an affirmative “yes,”
repeating the connective “yes”
she starts with) is a testament to
Joyce’s all-inclusive imagination.
However, some feminist critics see
Molly, in her passivity, as a creature
of male misconceptions.
As Molly lies in bed, away from
all stimuli, the interior monologue
can attain its purest form, without
narrative interruptions. Punctuation
is abandoned. Recollections jostle
together. Frank language, with
earthy colloquialisms, gives way to
a memory of her youth in Gibraltar
and her later passionate courtship
by Bloom, expressed in the style of
romantic fiction. This style is not
purely a literary device but part
of the inner language of Molly’s
romantic, though fleshly, sensibility.Myth and modernity
Linguistic experimentation is
not the only literary technique that
underpins this multilayered book.
The title, Ulysses, is the clue to an
elaborate symbolic substructure.
“Ulysses” is the Latin-derived name
for Odysseus, the Greek king of
Ithaca, who, in Homer’s epic poem
the Odyssey, spends 10 years after
the Trojan War as a wanderingadventurer, before returning home.
Joyce identifies Leopold Bloom with
Odysseus, and equates Stephen
with the king’s son, Telemachus,
who in the first four books of the
Odyssey searches in vain for his
lost father. He associates Molly
with Penelope, Odysseus’s wife,
who believes that her husband is
still alive and will return to her.
Each of the 18 episodes of the
novel (sometimes called chapters)
corresponds with an adventure
from Homer’s epic. The first three
episodes focus on Stephen, and
follow a structure that echoes the
Odyssey. In the third episode,
Stephen questions the institution of
fatherhood while thinking about a
discussion in a library. The passage
translates Telemachus’s predicament
as a son without a father into an
abstract debate on modern notions
of the father–son relationship.ULYSSES
In episode 12, the Cyclops, a one-
eyed giant from whom Odysseus
escapes in the Odyssey, takes the
form of an aggressively xenophobic
patriot who argues vociferously with
Bloom. The narrow chauvinism of the
“citizen” mirrors the Cyclops’ limited
vision. Later, the unnamed narrator
tells of a chimney sweep who “near
drove his gear into my eye.”
The thematic value of the
Homeric parallels is strongest in
the mythic roles given to Stephen
and Bloom. Stephen is unconsciously
seeking a supportive father figure,
so he can become a father himself,
both of children and of art. Passages
on the Holy Trinity, which containsIn Odysseus and Circe (1590) by
Bartholomeus Spranger, the witch
goddess uses her powers to seduce
the hero—paralleled by Bella Cohen’s
teasing of Bloom in Ulysses.Listen: a fourworded
wavespeech: seesoo,
hrss, rsseeiss, oos.
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