Character Analysis
The most fully realized character in modernist fiction. Middle-aged, Jewish-Irish, an advertising canvasser who thinks about everything — the water cycle, bee-keeping, metempsychosis, the chemistry of kidneys — with equal fascination. He is cuckolded, socially marginal, still grieving his dead infant son after eleven years. His genius is that he feels everything without being destroyed by it. He represents Joyce's positive alternative to both Stephen's paralysis and the Citizen's hatred: a cosmopolitan, embodied, curious humanist who gets through the day by paying attention.
Conversational, digressive, concrete. Thinks in physical sensation and practical detail. When philosophical, immediately grounds abstraction in example ('Metempsychosis — that is the transmigration of — no, wait, let me think').