Ulysses

Bloom rides in a carriage to Glasnevin Cemetery for the funeral of Paddy Dignam, a minor acquaintance who died of drink. With him are Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and Simon Dedalus — Stephen's father, a charming failure whom Bloom watches with the quiet attention he brings to everything. The carriage journey is the most sustained social scene Bloom has yet navigated, and we watch him manage it: saying too much at the wrong moment, mentioning suicide in front of a man whose father killed himself, being overlooked, being slightly patronized. He is not part of this circle of Catholic Dubliners in the way they are part of each other. He notices this without self-pity. At the cemetery, the coffin is carried to the grave, the priest performs the rites, and Bloom thinks about death with the same forensic curiosity he brings to everything else. He wonders about the practical biology of decomposition. He thinks about his father's suicide — the overdose of aconite, the note left in both English and Hungarian. He thinks about his son Rudy, who would be eleven years old now. The chapter's haunting figure is a man Bloom spots at the graveside: a man in a macintosh whom nobody seems to know or claim. He appears at no other funeral. Nobody knows his name. Bloom thinks of him as 'the man in the macintosh' and the figure haunts the novel — unidentified, unexplained, possibly nobody, possibly everyone who has ever stood at a grave without being seen. The chapter ends with Bloom leaving the cemetery, shaking off the pull of mourning, returning to the living city. 'Let them sleep.' He is the only character in this chapter who chooses life with anything resembling deliberateness.