UlyssesStudy Guide

Buck Mulligan comes from the stairhead of the Martello tower bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lie crossed. Stephen Dedalus is already the one who paid the rent. They will not sleep under this roof again. Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, after serialization, a ban, and seven years of work in cities that were not Dublin. The book that opens on this roof spends its real day with another man. At 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom fries a pork kidney, feeds the cat, and carries tea upstairs to Molly. A letter from Blazes Boylan is already in the house. The appointment is four o'clock. What the book will spend is that kitchen, and the walk that follows it: an advertising canvasser who knows what the afternoon will do, treated as if he were Odysseus.

Leopold Bloom is thirty-eight, a Jewish canvasser for newspaper advertisements, kind in ways the city does not reward, and already walking with the knowledge of what his wife will do. Molly Bloom is a singer still in bed, impatient with the burnt kidney, holding Boylan's note and a concert that is also a cover. Stephen is twenty-two, just paid for a morning's teaching at Dalkey, haunted by the mother he would not kneel for and by the friend who mocks the refusal. Mulligan takes the key of the tower and will drink what Stephen earned. Boylan is the impresario who sends fruit and then himself. The Citizen at Barney Kiernan's will make Bloom's Jewishness a public sport. Simon Dedalus can still sing at the Ormond and cannot keep a household. The pressure among them is not whether anyone will win the day. It is who can live through it without becoming cruel.

The morning splits. Stephen teaches a history class, collects his wages from Mr Deasy, and walks Sandymount Strand while his mind turns over drowned bodies, heresy, and a telegram that called him home to a dying mother. Bloom buys a cake of lemon soap at Sweny's, reads a letter from Martha Clifford in a church, and rides to Glasnevin in a carriage that passes Boylan in the street. At the graveside he thinks of Rudy, the son who lived eleven days, and of his father, who took poison in a hotel in Ennis. Lunch is a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne's. The hinge is four o'clock at the Ormond. Bloom sits downstairs among the singing while Boylan leaves for Eccles Street. Later, in Barney Kiernan's, the Citizen throws a biscuit tin after him into Little Britain Street. Nighttown takes both men through Bella Cohen's brothel until Bloom sees the dead boy in an Eton suit. He brings Stephen to a cabman's shelter, then home. They drink cocoa. Stephen will not stay. Bloom finds the imprint of another man in his own bed and lies down beside Molly anyway. She ends the book in the dark, unpunctuated, remembering Gibraltar and Howth and saying yes.

Joyce is not decorating a Dublin day with Homeric labels. He is asking what an Odyssey looks like when the suitor keeps the appointment and the husband still comes home. He wrote the book in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris about a city he had left in 1904 and would not return to. Each episode changes its method: newspaper headlines, a fugue of barmaids, the English language growing up in a maternity hospital, a hallucination that puts the whole unconscious on a stage, a catechism of the furniture at 7 Eccles Street. The ending refuses a slaughter and refuses a sermon. Stephen is not adopted. Molly is not purified. Bloom is not crowned. What is earned is the record itself: that an ordinary man's thought, digestion, kindness, and shame can fill a book that used to belong to kings.

Read the full summary on the book page →