JAMES JOYCE - ULYSSES - SUMMARY ANALYSIS

"Love loves to love love"

James Joyce's Ulysses is widely considered to be both a literary masterpiece and one of the hardest work in literature to read. Written in 1918, first published in instalments between March 1918 and December 1920 in an American Journal - The Little Review. As a novel, it was first published in 1922. This novel inspires such devotion that once a year on a day called 'Bloomsday' thousands of people all over the world dress up like the characters take to the streets and read the book aloud, and some even make a pilgrimage to Dublin, just to visit the places so vividly depicted in Joyce's opus. There are few remarkable things about the book, that keeps people coming back -  the plot. It transpires over a single day - June 16, Thursday.

The whole novel takes place on a single day - June 16, Thursday 1904, it was a special day for Joyce, as this was the day when he met Nora Barnacle, his future wife. During this day, the three main characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, wake up and have various encounters in Dublin and go to sleep eighteen hours later.

Leopold Bloom, the central character of this novel is a middle-aged man, work as a newspaper canvasser and non - practising Jew, represents Joyce's everyman. Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce's A portrait of an artist as a young man and also the alter ego of the author in this novel,  becomes momentarily Bloom's adopted son as he represents the alienated artist. Molly Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom is a voluptuous singer, planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director. 

This novel is regarded by most critics as the prose masterpiece of modernism. Ulysses greatest importance lies in its depth of character portrayal and the wide scope of humour. The book is especially famous for its use of the interior monologue of the stream of consciousness technique - which opened a whole new way of writing fiction. As its title suggests Ulysses is related to Homer's great epic - The Odyssey, the tale of Odysseus and his travels after the Trojan war. Joyce used The Odyssey as a structural framework for his book arranging characters and events around Homer's heroic model with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope.

Ulysses is the climax of Joyce's creativity and sums up the themes and techniques he had developed in his previous works. It was designed as a detailed account of orderly life on an ordinary Dublin day. Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street as though he was playing chess. He placed them in houses he knew -  drinking in pubs he had frequented, walking on cobblestones he retraced. he made the very air of Dublin the atmosphere, the feeling, the places almost indistinguishable certainly inseparable from the characters - consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. This use of mythical dimension to provide a shaping background for his modern epic called the Mythical method by T S Elliot, who sees the heroic prototype as a constant reminder of how great our modern age has fallen.