Ulysses

About the book

On 16 June 1904, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus move through Dublin on errands, visits, conversations, and private trains of thought. Molly Bloom's presence gives the day another emotional centre. Joyce enlarges ordinary activity through shifting narrative forms, verbal play, bodily detail, and echoes of Homer's Odyssey. The city is at once a shared physical environment and a different place within each consciousness. Memories and expectations continually interrupt the apparent simplicity of the present, bringing marriage, grief, religion, nationality, and belonging into passing encounters. The novel rewards attention to small recurrences without requiring every moment to resolve into a single pattern. Its extraordinary range emerges from treating a day's unexceptional materials as sufficient for comedy, conflict, tenderness, and the invention of new ways to write.

• Everyday life
• Consciousness
• Belonging

Why read it

For a novel that continually changes its means of narration to discover possibilities within an ordinary day's experience.

English text