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Lipoti Virag
The “citizen” is the belligerent Irish nationalist and former champion shot-putter who attacks Bloom at Barney Kiernan’s pub during “Cyclops.” His blind love for Ireland leads him to praise anything connected to his country and reject anything and everything foreign. Although his complaints about the British Empire are largely accurate, the citizen also xenophobically blames immigrants and Jews for Ireland’s woes, which leads him to identify Bloom as the enemy. This is ironic, because Bloom also sympathizes with the nationalists. (After all, the citizen’s name is also an ironic joke on his virulent nationalism, because at the time, Irish people were only citizens of the British Empire.) In one of the novel’s more direct Homeric parallels, the citizen arguably represents the brutish man-eating cyclops Polyphemus, who traps Odysseus in his cave and tries to eat him in the Odyssey. Odysseus outsmarts him by getting him drunk then stabbing him in his eye. Similarly, the citizen is so narrow-minded that he can only see things in one particular way, and his attack on Bloom fails because he’s drunk and he gets blinded by the sun. He represents the backward tendencies that Joyce despised within the Irish nationalist movement: intolerance, anti-intellectualism, personal irresponsibility, and an insistence on defining Irish identity through the rural past.
The Citizen Quotes in Ulysses
The Ulysses quotes below are all either spoken by The Citizen or refer to The Citizen. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Episode 12: Cyclops
Quotes
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower.
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—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
[…]
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
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Get the entire Ulysses LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Citizen Quotes in Ulysses
The Ulysses quotes below are all either spoken by The Citizen or refer to The Citizen. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Episode 12: Cyclops
Quotes
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex Europeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
—I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.
—Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
[…]
—But it’s no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
