Bloom goes to the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, where Mrs. Purefoy has been in labor for three days. He waits with a group of medical students and various acquaintances including Stephen Dedalus, who is drinking heavily. The chapter is built around the parallel between human gestation and the gestation of the English language: Joyce parodies every major style of English prose from Old English through medieval chronicle, Malory, the King James Bible, Pepys, Defoe, Sterne, Goldsmith, Burke, Lamb, Dickens, Carlyle, and the slang-saturated modernism of 1904: each passage a parody, each one a stage of literary development.
The content: a group of young men drinking and talking about sex, birth, contraception, and religion: is deliberately crude. Joyce places the crudest material inside the most elaborate literary container. The joke is serious: fertility, birth, and the body have always been at the center of life, and literature has spent centuries dressing them in ornate language to avoid looking directly.
Mrs. Purefoy gives birth successfully. The students celebrate, then move to Burke's pub and finally toward Nighttown.
Bloom watches Stephen, now drunk and reckless, and feels the beginning of something like paternal concern. Stephen is brilliant and burning out simultaneously: the potential that Bloom's dead son Rudy might have had, here in the wrong form, destroying itself in Dublin pubs. This recognition is the chapter's emotional core, half-buried beneath the literary pageant.
The chapter demands patience. Its payoff is cumulative: by the end, the reader understands that every way of writing about human life is a style, a period piece, a selection of what to reveal and suppress: and that Joyce is the first novelist who has made all the styles visible at once, refusing to let any single one claim authority over the rest.
