Bloom’s taste for the exotic and exciting brings him back to travel fantasies. Like his dream house, these fantasies promise total freedom and perfect fulfillment. They’re also a reference to his wandering throughout the novel and the trope of the “Wandering Jew,” a mythical immortal who roams around the world, waiting for the Messiah. “Everyman or Noman” is an insightful description of Bloom as a character. He’s the 20th century everyman—a middle-class liberal businessman. But because he’s such a normal guy, he’s a nobody when viewed in terms of the broader perspective of society as a whole, or the vast, empty universe. Where other epic heroes like Odysseus are exceptional because they are special and superior to other people, Bloom is an exceptional hero simply because he is an ordinary man described in extraordinary detail. Similarly, Bloom makes a remarkably insightful point about the nature of regret: people regret things only because time only flows in one direction and we can’t turn back the clock. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Space, unlike time,
is reversible: someone can always turn around and go back to where they came from. In fact, the spatial equivalent of turning back the clock is returning to one’s origins, or
homecoming—which is the central theme of the
Odyssey, this episode, and arguably the novel as a whole. Rather than being unable to travel or being forced to abandon home in order to wander forever, Bloom gets both: he has gone on an exciting voyage during the novel, without losing the comforts of home. (If, that is, he can prevent Blazes Boylan from usurping it.)