Ulysses

Molly Bloom speaks. She has not spoken at length in the novel until now — she has been a presence, a rumor, a photograph, a letter, an absence. Now she takes the entire final chapter, and Joyce gives her something no other character receives: no punctuation. No periods, no commas, no full stops. Thought flows into thought, memory into memory, present into past into desire into sleep without pause. Molly has had Blazes Boylan this afternoon. She is thinking about it — about him, about his body, about sex with some pleasure and some assessment. She is thinking about Bloom — his oddities, his failures, his persistent kindness, his strangeness in bed, the way he is and is not a man in the way she understands men. She is thinking about her childhood in Gibraltar, her mother, her first kisses, the soldiers, the sea. She is thinking about whether to encourage a young man — Stephen Dedalus, whom Bloom mentioned — to visit the house. She likes the idea of a young man around the house. She knows herself in this regard. And then she is thinking about the day on Howth Head: the rhododendrons, the rock where he kissed her, the seedcake he asked her to give him from her mouth, and her saying yes, and the sun shining, and yes she would yes. The chapter ends in one of the most famous passages in literature: Molly remembering Bloom's proposal and her acceptance, the yes accumulating and resolving and opening again into affirmation. Not a passive yes. A chosen yes. A yes that knows what it is agreeing to and agrees anyway. Joyce gave the last word to the woman who had been talked about all day and never fully heard. The novel ends not with Stephen's cold ambition or Bloom's resigned kindness but with Molly's full, complicated, physical, alive yes.