Ulysses

Joyce assigned each episode a corresponding episode from the Odyssey — but he never included these correspondences in the published text. Why? What would be gained or lost by making the parallels explicit?

Bloom thinks in complete, digressive sentences; Stephen thinks in dense philosophical fragments; Molly thinks in long unpunctuated waves. How does Joyce use syntax to create character? What does each thinking style reveal about its owner?

Molly Bloom's monologue ends on 'yes.' Stephen's first episode opens with 'Stately, plump' — the first word 'Stately' being formal, imposing, ceremonial. What does this contrast between the novel's opening and closing words tell you about the novel's arc?

The Ithaca episode presents Bloom and Stephen's conversation in the form of a catechism — a series of questions and answered as if by a theology textbook. Why does Joyce treat a conversation over cocoa with the same formal apparatus as Catholic doctrine?

Bloom is Jewish in a Catholic city, and this fact shapes nearly every encounter in the novel. Is Ulysses an antisemitic novel, a philo-Semitic novel, or something more complicated? Use the Cyclops episode as your primary evidence.

Stephen tells his Hamlet theory in the National Library: Shakespeare is the ghost, not Hamlet. Apply this theory to Ulysses itself. Who is Joyce in his own novel?

The Circe episode is written as a dramatic script and stages hallucinations that can't literally be happening. What is gained by presenting Bloom's and Stephen's unconscious lives as theater?

Bloom knows Molly is having an affair with Boylan. He doesn't stop it, doesn't leave, doesn't confront her. Is this cowardice, acceptance, love, or something else? Use evidence from his thinking throughout the day.

The Wandering Rocks episode presents nineteen simultaneous vignettes of different characters in Dublin. Why does Joyce abandon the single-consciousness technique for this episode? What is the argument of the form?

Joyce said that if Dublin were destroyed, it could be rebuilt from the pages of Ulysses. Is this level of topographical specificity a virtue or a limitation? Does it make the novel universal or provincial?

Molly's monologue is often praised as a feminist achievement — a woman's unmediated voice at the center of literary history. But Joyce was a man writing it. Does authorship matter here? Is Molly a real woman or a male fantasy?

The Oxen of the Sun episode imitates the entire history of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to 1904 Dublin slang. What is Joyce's argument about literary history? Does the episode suggest that English prose has progressed, declined, or simply changed?

Compare the opening of Ulysses ('Stately, plump Buck Mulligan') with the opening of Hamlet ('Who's there?'). Both are famous first lines that immediately establish an atmosphere of uncertainty and challenge. What do they share? What is different?

In the Sirens episode, Joyce structures the text like a musical fugue, including a two-page 'prelude' of musical fragments before the narrative begins. Does prose actually become music in this episode, or is this a formal impossibility that Joyce's achievement reveals?

Stephen's 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake' is one of the most quoted lines in the novel. By the end of the novel, has Stephen woken up? Has Bloom ever been asleep?

Ulysses contains no conventional plot in the sense of causally linked events driving toward a climax. Is the novel plotless, or does it have a different kind of plot? What is the arc, if any?

June 16, 1904 — Joyce's first date with Nora Barnacle — is Bloomsday. What does it mean that the most encyclopedic, formally complex, historically significant novel of the 20th century is, at its origin, a love letter?

The novel has been read as a Catholic novel (Stephen's theology), a Jewish novel (Bloom's marginality), and an atheist novel (both characters rejecting their traditions). Which reading does the text most support? Can it be all three?

How would Ulysses read differently if it were written today? What would a modernist 'one day in a city' novel look like now — what technologies, anxieties, and formal possibilities would replace Joyce's?

The Penelope episode has no punctuation and almost no paragraph breaks. Read a page aloud. What does the physical act of reading the unpunctuated text do to you as a reader? How does the form change your experience of the content?

Bloom is mocked, excluded, and chased out of Barney Kiernan's pub. He responds with 'Your God was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like me.' How does this moment function as the novel's ethical climax?

Joyce spent 1914-1921 writing Ulysses — the same years as World War I. The war barely appears in the novel. Is this absence meaningful, or is Dublin in 1904 simply before the war?

Compare Bloom and Hamlet as characters who know of an infidelity and choose not to act on it. What does each man's inaction mean in his respective text?

The first word of Ulysses is 'Stately'; the last word is 'Yes.' Map the emotional journey between these two words. What has been renounced, accepted, and discovered?

Ulysses has never been successfully adapted to film. (The 1967 version is considered failed; others barely attempted it.) Why? What does this inability tell you about what the novel is doing that other art forms cannot?

Stephen's mother appears to him as a ghost demanding repentance. At the end of Circe, he destroys her image with his ashplant. Has he freed himself, or simply suppressed the guilt?

The 'man in the macintosh' appears at Paddy Dignam's funeral and is never identified. He is spotted by Bloom throughout the day and never explained. What is Joyce doing by including an intentionally unresolvable mystery?

Ulysses was found obscene in 1920 and its serialization was halted. The 1933 court ruling that overturned this is a landmark in free expression law. Read Judge Woolsey's ruling. Does his legal definition of literary merit hold up as literary criticism?

Bloom's day ends with his head at Molly's feet, facing the direction she faces — a reversal of the normal sleeping arrangement. What does this position signify about their marriage, and about Bloom's relationship to Molly in the novel as a whole?

Joyce divided Ulysses into three parts (Telemachiad, Odyssey, Nostos) corresponding to the Odyssey's structure. The Nostos (homecoming) consists of Eumaeus, Ithaca, and Penelope. Has Bloom actually 'come home' by the novel's end? In what sense — literal, emotional, existential?