This is the loudest chapter in the novel. A nameless narrator: a sharp-tongued Dublin cynic: reports from Barney Kiernan's pub, where a group of men are drinking and holding forth about Irish nationalism, sport, and various grievances. At the center, growing in size and fury, is the Citizen: a fierce, monomaniacal Irish nationalist who sits with his massive dog Garryowen and dispenses prejudice with absolute confidence.
Bloom arrives to wait for Martin Cunningham. He gets drawn into a conversation about nationalism and, when pressed, offers a definition of a nation that includes the Jewish people. The Citizen does not appreciate this. The tension builds.
The chapter parodies epic style: Joyce interrupts the pub conversation with mock-heroic passages in the manner of Old Irish sagas, describing ordinary events in inflated, archaic language. A round of drinks becomes a sacred rite. A small dog becomes a mythological beast. The Citizen becomes Cyclops: a one-eyed monster who sees only one version of reality and mistakes that limitation for clarity.
Bloom's climactic exchange with the Citizen is the moral center of the novel. Asked what his nation is, Bloom says Ireland: he was born here. The Citizen pushes back with anti-Semitism. Bloom responds with the statement that defines the book's ethical argument: 'Force, hatred, history, all that. That is not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it is the opposite of that that is really life.' Love, he means.
He leaves just before the Citizen flings a biscuit tin after his departing carriage. Bloom escapes. The Citizen rages in the pub. The novel has made its argument: that hatred, however passionately held and politically dressed, is a failure of vision, and that Bloom's embarrassing, impractical insistence on love is the more courageous position.
Coming Up in Chapter 13
As evening falls on Dublin's strand, we encounter Gerty MacDowell, a young woman whose romantic fantasies will intersect with Bloom's solitary wandering in ways both tender and troubling The sun is setting on Sandymount strand. Gerty MacDowell sits with two friends watching children play near the rocks while fireworks go off from a nearby bazaar..
