For Students
Because every technique in contemporary fiction — interior monologue, unreliable narration, formal experimentation, the elevation of the ordinary to the universal — traces back through Ulysses. You don't have to read all of it in one course. But knowing what it attempts, and how, is knowing the grammar of modern literature. Also: Bloom is one of the most fully human characters ever written. A middle-aged man who likes kidneys and thinks about bees and misses his dead son and handles the fact of his wife's infidelity with more grace than most people handle far smaller humiliations. That character alone is worth 730 pages.
For Teachers
Ulysses is not one novel — it's eighteen, each with its own style, techniques, and teachable arguments. You can assign individual episodes (Ithaca, Penelope, Cyclops) as standalone texts. The Homeric parallel provides infinite comparison opportunities. The stream-of-consciousness episodes are the best teaching tools in existence for discussing what narrative mediation actually does — because Ulysses removes it. Students who understand Ulysses's formal range understand literary technique itself.
Why It Still Matters
Bloom's question — how do you remain a decent person on an ordinary day when everything is quietly going wrong — is permanent. His answer (with curiosity, with kindness, with kidneys for breakfast) is not ironic. Joyce loved Bloom. The novel that seems most alienating, most difficult, most formally baroque is at its center a portrait of a man trying to get through a Tuesday with his humanity intact. That is the most universal story there is.