Questions and Answers in the Night — Ulysses

Bloom and Stephen arrive at 7 Eccles Street. Bloom has forgotten his key and gets in through the basement window. He makes cocoa. They drink it together in the kitchen and Stephen leaves. That is the plot. What Joyce does with this plot is construct the most formally unusual chapter in the novel.

Ithaca is written as a catechism: a series of questions and answers in the style of a Catholic or scientific textbook. 'What did Bloom do? What did Stephen do? What did each see in the other?' The questions are pedantic, the answers exhaustively precise and deliberately disproportionate. When asked what Bloom thinks as he lights the kitchen fire, Joyce provides three hundred words of astronomical reflection on the relative insignificance of human existence against the scale of the cosmos. When asked about the water Bloom pours for the cocoa, he provides a disquisition on Dublin's water supply, its history, its chemistry.

The technique is the argument: the domestic universe: a kitchen, a kettle, two cups of cocoa: contains everything. The ordinary is infinite if attended to with sufficient care. This is Joyce's answer to epic grandeur: the heroism of the examined ordinary life.

Stephen and Bloom's conversation covers Shakespeare, music, anti-Semitism, Ireland, and Bloom's singing voice. They find unexpected common ground and unexpected separateness. Stephen declines Bloom's invitation to stay and leaves into the night. They will not meet again.

Bloom goes upstairs. Molly is in bed. He tells her about his day in compressed form. He gets into bed and lies with his head at her feet: a position of reversal, of return, of something that is not resolution but is at least presence. He falls asleep.

The last thing we see is a dot. Joyce ends the chapter with a period: a full stop answering, wordlessly, the catechism's final question: Where?