Ulysses by James Joyce

Introduction: A Whole World in a Single Day

June 16, 1904. Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser, wakes in Dublin. He attends a funeral, eats a gorgonzola sandwich, visits a newspaper office, a pub, a maternity hospital, and a brothel. He worries about his wife Molly's imminent affair. He encounters Stephen Dedalus, the young intellectual from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nothing much happens—and everything happens. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the Mount Everest of modernist literature: forbidding, exhilarating, and undeniably magnificent.

Why It's Worth the Climb

Each of the novel's 18 episodes employs a different literary style, paralleling an episode from Homer's Odyssey. The famous final chapter, "Penelope," is Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness—eight enormous unpunctuated sentences ending with the word "yes." The novel was banned for obscenity in the United States until 1934. Today it is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of 20th-century art.

Ordinary Heroism

Joyce's genius is to find the epic in the everyday. Bloom is not a warrior like Odysseus but an ordinary man—cuckolded, mocked, but unfailingly decent. His wanderings through Dublin become a modern odyssey, and his humanity redeems the novel's intellectual pyrotechnics. "Think you're escaping and run into yourself," Joyce wrote. "Longest way round is the shortest way home."

Key Takeaways

• The ordinary is heroic: Bloom's mundane day is as epic as Odysseus's journey.
• Form follows meaning: Each chapter's style reflects its theme.
• Reading Ulysses changes how you read: It rewires your brain for complexity and ambiguity.