"It is the book to which all of us are indebted and none of us can escape".
James Joyce's
Ulysses (no,
not that Ulysses,
nor that one -
this one, neither), despite having a reputation for being
unreadable (though a degree in literature or a working knowledge of
Classical Mythology,
William Shakespeare, modernism and Irish political history
do help), is still widely-regarded as one of the most important
novels since
Don Quixote, influencing an immeasurable number of men and women in the writing field, its
Big Name Fans including the likes of authors as distinct from each other as
Stephen King and Salman Rushdie; saying this book made an impact is
like saying water is wet.
It was first published in serialized form from 1918 to 1920, then collected in book form and republished in 1922. The actual
story can be jotted on the back of a matchbook. Taking place in a single day - June 16th 1904 - in
Dublin,
Ulysses follows the daily routine of three people: young and jaded would-be artist Stephen Dedalus, passive outsider Leopold Bloom and his sensual, unfaithful wife Molly. As Stephen and Leopold wander the streets of Dublin, Molly lies in bed all day and cheats on her husband. Eventually, Leopold saves Stephen from a beating at the hands of British soldiers and invites him home to recuperate. Stephen visits his home, but declines to stay the night and Leopold joins Molly in bed.
The End.
The treat of the novel is in its style and the rendering of the characters in remarkable detail, often using their direct
Inner Monologue, or having their style of thought influence the third-person perspective. Their meals, visits to the bathroom, work, affairs, prejudices, fantasies, are all recorded.
Nothing is spared. Every chapter mimics, parallels and/or parodies a section of
Homer's
Odyssey (for example, Ulysses' battle with the Cyclops becomes the Jewish Leopold debating religion and politics with a raving, bigoted nationalist with a glass eye). Every chapter is also a literary experiment, where Joyce breaks every rule of novel writing. It's fair to say that the novel is
700 pages of equal parts gibberish and blarney, but because of the strict thematic framework, it's actually possible for determined literature geeks to get their brain around it.
More details here if you need 'em
.
The full novel is public domain, and can be found
here.
Ulysses uses the following tropes:
- A Date with Rosie Palms: On a public beach, no less.
- Abusive Parents: Simon Dedalus: neglectful drunk (based on Joyce's own Dad).
- Affectionate Parody: The Oxen of The Sun chapter, which spoofs the styles of Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens amongst others.
- All Jews Are Cheapskates: Played straight in-universe, but subverted for the reader, with Bloom. Early in the book he makes a chance remark to an acquaintance, Flynn, who mistakenly interprets it as a racing tip. Flynn bets on the horse, which wins. Later, Bloom is in a pub and when he goes out for a moment, another character (who's heard from Flynn about Bloom's supposed racing tip) says that Bloom's won a pile of money at the races and must have gone to collect it. When Bloom returns and doesn't stand everyone a round of drinks, it's assumed that he's being a cheapskate, causing mayhem to break out. In fact, Bloom is generous with money and completely oblivious of the whole business with the horse.
- Anti-Hero: Leopold Bloom. While he is very pleasant, nothing about him is classically heroic.
- Author Avatar: Stephen Dedalus. Joyce's first book (which centered around Stephen) wasn't called A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man for nothing, though Joyce is very critical of his avatar. Also worthy of note is the enigmatic man in the brown mackintosh.
- Badass Boast: Arguably, saying that you've read it.
- Beige Prose: The first chapter, with most actions qualified by an adverb only and sentences (other than Stephen's interior monologue) rarely deviating from standard subject-object verb syntax. Meant to mimic the style of beginning fiction writers, and convey that it's the beginning of the day when the imagination hasn't kicked in fully.
- Big "YES!": The very last word, as Molly recalls when she accepted Leopold's proposal.
- Country Matters: Complete with related wordplay.
- Creator Provincialism: All of Joyce's work is set in Dublin or the surrounding area.
- Deconstruction: Novels as an art form, and English as a language.
- Defictionalization: All the locations are real, some still exist, and real-life Dubliners crop up as characters with their real names.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The riffs on Homer's The Odyssey.
- Dublin
- The Everyman: Deconstructed. Bloom has some weird trains of thought.
- Evil Brit: The soldiers in Circe.
- Gender Bender: In one of Bloom's masochist fantasies, he is turned into a woman and raped by the Brothel Madam, who has turned into a male ringmaster.
- Genre Roulette: the Circe chapter is written as a play, Ithaca like a catechism, Aeolus like a newspaper column, and the final chapter is a punctuation free list of the thoughts going through Molly's mind as she has tries to fall asleep next to her husband. There are too many examples to list here.
- Guide Dang It: A rare literary example. Spoilers and annotations are often necessary to get what the hell is going on, especially in the eye-watering "Oxen of the Sun".
- Heroic Bystander: Bloom is this to Stephen, during Stephen's encounter with the British soldiers.
- Innocent Bigot: Played with throughout the book, with almost all the male characters displaying various kinds of more or less kneejerk anti-Semitism in the presence of Bloom, who's Jewish and too polite to call them on it.
- Irishman And A Jew: Played straight, and also subverted in the case of Bloom, who's both Irish and Jewish, although some of the less sympathetic characters regard him as the latter rather than the former.
- Jews Love to Argue: Almost entirely averted with Bloom, who hates confrontation; except just once, when he calls the Citizen on his anti-semitism.
- Kangaroo Court: Bloom fantasies being 'tried' by all the women he has ever lusted after.
- Kavorka Man: Blazes Boylan.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the last Chapter, Molly thinks "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh" and may be referring to James Joyce. Or something else. It's not really explained.
- Mad Artist: Carl Jung read the book and concluded that Joyce was schizophrenic.
- Meaningful Name: Stephen Dedalus.
- Mindscrew: The Circe chapter where Bloom roams the red light district, hallucinating.
- No Punctuation Period: The entire final chapter contains only three punctuation marks.
- Oireland: Every cliche is averted, except for the ones Joyce confirms.
- Only Sane Man: Usually Bloom, but Martin Cunningham becomes this in the Cyclops episode where Bloom lets himself get into an increasingly vicious argument with the Citizen.
- Parody: The Oxen of the Sun episode is written as a series of parodies of different English literature, beginning with ritual chanting and direct translation from the Latin via parodies of writers from Geoffrey Chaucer to Thomas Carlyle all the way down to early 20th century Bowery slang. In chronological order.
- Precision F-Strike: The thuggish British soldiers who attack a drunk Stephen.
- Purple Prose: On purpose in the antepenultimate chapter. Justified because it's the early morning and the characters have been on their feet all day, so the prose style is correspondingly filled with tired cliches and rambling sentences.
- Real Place Background: Joyce claimed that if Dublin was destroyed you could rebuild it from the detail provided in this book.
- Riddle For The Ages: The identity of the Man in the Macintosh.
- Rule of Symbolism: In spades.
- Shout Out: To almost every major novelist and poet in the history of Western literature.
- The Snark Knight: Stephen lives this trope with a vengeance; he's so snarky that he can't even bothered to snark out loud, preferring to do it in his Inner Monologue. As the book continues and his alcohol intake increases, he loosens up and starts speaking his mind, climaxing when his snarkery offends a drunk British soldier so much that the soldier knocks him down, thus attracting the attention of the local police - but then Bloom, who Stephen hardly knows, steps in and defuses the situation, resulting in a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
- Spiritual Sequel: It carries on from A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, and it's considered a necessary primer for Finnegans Wake.
- Stylistic Suck: Nausicaa, 'narrated' by a drippy teenage girl, acts as a Take That to slushy romance novels. But there's a twist: the girls 'narration' may actually be Bloom's inner monologue, part of his pretty sad sexual fantasies while he watches her and wanks on the beach., which would actually make it even more of a Take That.
- Although that interpretation is rather unlikely. It's generally accepted that Bloom's just not intelligent enough to alter his own internal monologue like that, even if he wanted to.
- Additionally, Bloom himself is earlier shown to like crummy fiction. It's most strongly implied in the chapter itself that the narration reflects Gertie's escape into adolescent fantasy as her way of avoiding the reality that, due to her lame leg, she will likely never be courted, let alone married. Note that she's also revealed to be older than the narrative leads the reader to believe. Word Of God says that it's Gertie's own narration; she would love for her life to be a romantic novel, but throughout her narration, reality keeps breaking in (as evidenced by her snarkish asides about her friends). She is more in control of her own fantasies than she is usually given credit for.
- Take That: Privates Carr and Compton, the two drunken British soldiers who confront and assault Stephen Dedalus in the "Circe" episode, are named after two British consular officials in Zurich Joyce was having difficulties with.
- Twice Told Tale
- Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Leopold and Molly. For all that she experiments with infidelity, Molly seems in the end to be committed to Leopold.
- Unfazed Everyman: Bloom.
- Viewers Are Geniuses
- Writer on Board: While Joyce does support Irish emancipation, he sketches a negative portrait of the more radical, excluding nationalists such as the one-eyed man. Bloom's humorous thoughts during his visit to the church can be seen as mocking Catholicism, but it's in good humour.
- Written Sound Effect: According to Joyce, the sound a cat makes isn't "meow," it's "mrkgnao."
WARNING: This book can drive you mad, and its
follow up will.
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