Awesome / Ulysses

• "....but I suspect that Ireland is important because it belongs to me." In context, one of Stephen's more arrogant, yet weirdly awesome moments. Hell, Stephen's whole drunken rage against the British soldiers is a great Refuge in Audacity moment subverted in that he ends up falling on his face and having to be rescued by Bloom, but still.
• The scene in the pub in "Cyclopes" where eternal doormat Nice Guy Bloom finally stands up to the anti-semitic Citizen and proudly affirms his own Judaism in front of everybody. The first scene in the whole book where Bloom shows real backbone.
  Bloom: Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
  • The last such scene takes place between the second-last and last chapters: Bloom has asked Molly to bring him Breakfast in Bed the next morning, instead of (as is usual) the other way round. Molly's interior monologue starts with her mulling over this request.
• The whole damn novel is one crowning moment of awesome for Joyce, who utilizes and parodies (sometimes affectionately sometimes not) so many styles of writing that the novel itself is an Odyssey tracing several hundred years of the literary discourse.
  • Joyce wrote it during a period when his eyesight was failing, so to compensate he wrote in crayon on large sheets of butcher paper.
• As a testament to the book's influence, there's now a statue◊ of Molly Bloom standing in Gibraltar. She was chosen as the subject of the statue because she's—without doubt—the most famous Gibraltarian in the history of fiction.

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