Ulysses Themes

James Joyce’s influential modernist novel Ulysses follows an ordinary man, the Dublin advertiser Leopold Bloom, on the ordinary day of June 16, 1904. Bloom eats breakfast, attends a funeral, fails to place an ad, thinks about his wife Molly’s affair with her manager Blazes Boylan, and gets into a bar fight. In the evening, he meets the novel’s second protagonist, the 22-year-old starving poet Stephen Dedalus, and follows him into Dublin’s brothel…

Joyce’s Ulysses is famously modeled on Homer’s Odyssey: in addition to naming his book after the Homeric hero Odysseus (or “Ulysses” in Latin), Joyce also titled his chapters (or “episodes”) after different books of Homer’s epic. But despite the significant correspondences between Ulysses and the Odyssey, it would be wrong to treat Joyce’s work as a mere adaptation or reinterpretation of Homer’s work. In addition to the Odyssey, Joyce frequently alludes to…

On their epic journeys through Dublin, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus don’t magically save the day like superheroes. Instead, they spend plenty of time stuck, bogged down in guilt, regret, confusion, and fear. Like most ordinary people, Joyce’s protagonists struggle to cope with things that are out of their control—especially their inability to change the past and their certainty that they will die in the future. In a word, they are grappling with fate, which…

In the early 20th century Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, modernity is fast displacing tradition. Where collective life used to be totally organized around the church, it’s quickly shifting to modern institutions (like newspapers, universities, and corporations) and urban social spaces (like pubs, beaches, and street corners). In turn, Joyce’s Dubliners increasingly choose the excitement, consumerism, and vice of modern urban life over the traditional Catholic values of their parents and grandparents. But when…

Ulysses is Joyce’s ambitious attempt to condense the universal range of human experience into one novel, but it’s also deeply rooted in the particular historical, cultural, and political context of a specific place and time: Dublin, the capital of colonized Ireland, at the turn of the 20th century. Joyce’s distinctive local dialects and wordplay, his meticulous attention to Dublin’s geography, and his constant references to Irish history and politics make Ulysses as much a distinctively…