Leopold Bloom
An everyman Odysseus of ads, kidneys, and unshowy kindness.
Modernism · Novel · 1922
Ulysses
James Joyce
One Dublin day—16 June 1904—maps the Odyssey onto advertising, grief, and a kitchen. Style changes with the hour.
Modernist epic
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
Characters
Stephen Dedalus
Telemachus as young artist, still at war with fathers.
Molly Bloom
The book’s last weather: a yes that rewrites the day.
Themes
The ordinary epic
Heroism relocated to a walk, a funeral, a cup of cocoa.
Language
Each episode invents a way the world might be said.
Motifs
Dublin as a nervous system the reader learns by foot.
Souls and plots recirculate; Homer is a contemporary.