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THE ULYSSES
The story
The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, which was special to
Joyce because it was the day that Nora Barnacle, his future wife, made her fondness clear to
him
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The central character, Leopold Bloom, a
middle-aged advertising canvasser and non-practicing Jew, is Joyce’s common man
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5), endures misadventures and delight
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Finally there’s Bloom’s wife, Molly, a
voluptuous singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director
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Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural
framework for his book, arranging its characters and events around Homer’s heroic model,
with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus, and Molly as the faithful Penelope
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While the Homeric
parallels are the most important structural device in the novel, each chapter is additionally
organised around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a
narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter
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It was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an
ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street as
though he were playing chess
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He made the very air of Dublin, the
atmosphere, the feeling, the place, almost indistinguishable, certainly inseparable, from his
human characters
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The representation of human nature
Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom are more than individuals: they represent two
aspects of human nature
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Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, since she identifies herself

totally with her sensual nature and fecundity; her train of thought, while she is lying in the
darkness at night, is carried on by her own memories, one triggering another by a kind of
association which is simply literal
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The theme of the novel, implied by the quest or journey, is
moral: human life means suffering, falling but also struggling to rise and seek the good
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This allowed the author to make a parallel with the Odyssey and provides the book
with a symbolic, cross-temporal meaning; Homer’s myth was used to enlarge by
resemblance and difference the actions and people of a Dublin day, to give them another
dimension and to express the universal in the particular
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In fact in Ulysses he achieved
a new form of realism
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In fact, Joyce combined several methods to present a variety of
matters
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In Ulysses
Joyce brought to perfection the interior monologue employing both the two levels of
narration, one external to the character’s mind and the other internal, and only the mind
level of narration, with the character’s thoughts flowing freely without any interruption
coming from the external world
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Foreign words, literary quotations and allusions to other
texts are other important linguistic features

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