“Oxen of the Sun” ends by juxtaposing another raucous drinking scene with more religious imagery. This foreshadows the novel’s climax in the next episode, when Bloom and Stephen have an important epiphany in a brothel. While Joyce’s different authorial voices have grown closer together in time over the course of the episode, their tones have diverged more and more. Now, the very end of the episode devolves into a cacophony of different voices that simply don’t fit together, even though they’re all written in the same local Dublin accent. It’s just as difficult to understand as the Latin voices at the very beginning of the episode. For one, this stylistic choice reflects the men’s increasing drunkenness and provides a natural transition into the wild fantasy that makes up the next episode. But Joyce also seems to be using this diversity of styles to comment on the diversity of people, literature, and perspectives in the modern world. In
Ulysses, he attempts to make a series of extremely different experiences and worldviews fit together into a single book. Rather than forcing them all into a unified, homogenous whole, he portrays a few of these in depth and gives a hint of the broader variety of “parallax” life that coexists in modern Dublin.