Bloom and Stephen sit together in a cabman's shelter near the quays, drinking bad coffee and eating a stale bun in the small hours of the morning. They are together for the first time as something approaching companions. The chapter is written in deliberately exhausted prose: long, cliched sentences, digressive, poorly constructed: to capture the quality of late-night conversation when both participants are tired, slightly drunk, and the edges of thought have softened.
The shelter is run by a man rumored to be Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, the driver in the Phoenix Park murders. A sailor named W.B. Murphy is there, telling outrageous travel stories that may or may not be true. Various Dublin legends and grievances are discussed. Bloom thinks about food, about Molly, about Stephen.
Bloom attempts to connect with Stephen: to offer something, though he is not entirely sure what. He shows Stephen a photograph of Molly. Stephen looks at it without apparent interest and says something about the image of the woman in art. Bloom suggests Stephen could stay at his house, could eat there, could perhaps give Molly Italian lessons. The offer is genuine and slightly gauche and represents the closest Bloom comes to saying what he actually feels: that he sees in this young man something worth saving.
Stephen is polite but not warm. He is too tired, too drunk, too caught inside himself to receive what Bloom is offering. But he does not refuse it entirely either. They walk together toward Eccles Street.
The chapter's style is the argument: exhaustion makes cliches feel like intimacy. Two men who cannot quite reach each other nevertheless walk in the same direction through the dark city, and for one night, that is enough.
Coming Up in Chapter 17
The two men walk through the quiet Dublin streets toward Bloom's home, where the night's revelations will culminate in an unexpected moment of recognition and the profound questions that define human connection will be examined with scientific precision..
