During the funeral, Bloom contemplates the nature of death and tries to identify an unfamiliar man in a macintosh raincoat. He also notices a funeral procession for a child, which reminds him of his son Rudy, who died as an infant. While riding through town in a carriage with Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and Simon Dedalus, Bloom sees the “worst man in Dublin”- Blazes Boylan, his wife’s concert manager, who is probably sleeping with her. In the following chapter, “Hades,” Bloom attends the funeral of his acquaintance Paddy Dignam. In episode five, “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom strolls through Dublin, retrieves a love letter from his secret pen pal Martha Clifford, and wanders into a Catholic service (even though he’s Jewish). Leopold Bloom in the fourth episode, “Calypso.” Bloom wakes up, buys himself a pork kidney for breakfast, and serves tea and toast to his wife, the concert singer Molly Bloom. He contemplates the nature of perception, history, courage, and much more. In the third episode, “Proteus,” Stephen goes on a long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy as he walks on the Sandymount Strand beach. Deasy loyally defends England’s imperial rule over Ireland and convinces Stephen to help him get a letter about cattle foot and mouth disease published in the local newspaper. In the next chapter, “Nestor,” Stephen teaches at a nearby school and collects his monthly wages from Mr. He still feels guilty for refusing to pray at her deathbed after losing his faith in God, and his roommates are so intolerable that he decides to find another place to sleep that night. They live in a Martello tower, which Stephen has been renting since he returned from Paris to Dublin to see his dying mother a year ago. Similarly, the Odyssey opens with the story of Odysseus’s son Telemachus, rather than Odysseus himself-in fact, the first episode of Ulysses is called “Telemachus.” In this episode, Stephen has breakfast with his roommates, the annoying students Buck Mulligan and Haines. The novel’s first three chapters deal not with Leopold Bloom, but with Stephen Dedalus, the twenty-two-year-old starving artist who was the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But it would be misleading to take this parallel too far and assume that every character, event, and theme in the Odyssey maps directly onto Ulysses (or vice-versa). Leopold Bloom’s quest through Dublin is loosely modeled on Homer’s Odyssey-each of the novel’s eighteen chapters (or “episodes”) roughly corresponds to a book from the Odyssey.

Although the novel’s plot is deceptively simple, its structure, style, and literary and historical references are incredibly complex. James Joyce’s famously dense and unconventional modernist novel Ulysses follows the advertiser Leopold Bloom as he goes about his day in Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904.

Ulysses by james joyce