I have a confession.  For all this talk of Joyce is a genius, language is amazing, well worth the effort, blah-blah-blah, ultimately I didn’t really love this book.  I appreciate it in the way you appreciate Thanksgiving dinner: you definitely don’t want to eat it every day, and to be honest, pizza delivery might have been tastier after all.  The pomp and consequence of Ulysses is something to behold; the elevation of the everyday to mythological quest status changed the novel forever; this book is awesome when you think about it.  The problem for me arises in that it is just too darn long. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man uses some of the same stylistic tricks, but it’s around 600 pages shorter.  In small doses, the style is interesting, enjoyable even.  But in a work this long, it just wears a person out (especially when she’s trying to read 50 book in 50 weeks).  I *get* Ulysses, but I don’t love it, at least not in the way I read it.  Yeah, it took me over a month to finish it, but even that wasn’t a slow enough pace.  If you are going to read it, I would suggest doing it in small chunks and plan to spend a year of weekends on it.  As I said in the other posts, it is worth putting effort into, and there are parts that are transcendentally good and for those parts it is worth reading.  But just like your day and my day, the depicted day of June 16, 1904 is constructed with pockets of tedium, annoyance and desperation.  Be prepared to experience it along with the characters.

Leopold Bloom is the Odysseus figure in Ulysses.  However, he functions almost as a refutation of the Homeric hero who survives by his wits and strength! who overcomes all adversaries with might! who destroys them utterly!  In The Odyssey, Bloom would have discovered his wife’s affair with Blazes Boylan and murdered him summarily.  In Ulysses, Bloom quietly comes home to his unfaithful wife whom he loves without bothering himself with any “masculine pride”.  

Ulysses is an epic celebrating the mundane, the heroic in the ordinary man, an outsider, who accepts his life and gleans from it the happiness he has in his reach.  The invisible striver is the antagonist in this story, the man who skulks around town seducing women and picking up what he can while giving the least of himself possible.  This is Blazes Boylan, Molly’s suitor.  

Even though Leopold Bloom has a skewed idea of his wife Molly, of what she wants and who she is, he thinks of her constantly.  Their intimacy is limited, but he loves her with a tenderness characteristic of a hero who is the antithesis of the warrior archetype.  Joyce seems to hint that there is a ravine between husband and wife that can never be fully bridged, but that this does not diminish the love between them.

Bloom is a sympathetic character, despite his lascivious fantasies and his strange inner rantings.  Part of this is because Joyce has made him a figure of tragic loneliness.  At one point Bloom thinks, “A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life.”  This is key to his roamings.  He misses his daughter Milly, off pursuing her education and career; he has a longing for his dead son, for whom he allows Dedalus to be a stand-in. But most of all, he feels the distance between himself and Molly.  As I said when I started this book, Ulysses is partly about how you can never fully know someone else.  But it is also about how we interact with and forgive flawed people precisely because we know on some level that we have several forgiveness-worthy flaws as well.

Bloom indulges in a funk, he feels his role as outsider – alienation from the church, in his career, in Irish society which is dominated by Catholicism.  Just before lunch, he laments, “This is the very worst hour of the day.  Vitality.  Dull, gloomy: hate this hour.  Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.”  He steps into a diner and out again after a vivid description of his disgust at people eating like animals.  ”Out.  I hate dirty eaters…Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail.  Gulp.  Grub.  Gulp.  Gobstuff….Eat or be eaten,  Kill!  Kill!” This illustrates yet another allusion to his complete difference from the Homeric hero.

It is worth mentioning that the scene at the end of Ulysses feels almost like the climax of Romeo and Juliet. Instead of a double suicide, the star-crossed lovers engage in separate, silent prayers, a kind of double-resolution of their loyalties and loves.  Bloom comes home to a sleeping wife, kisses her bottom, and silently goes to sleep.  Molly wakes and finds him asleep, thinks on her love for him, offering a conquest that Bloom may never realize he has over her.  This is not the conquest of the Odyssey, but is a quiet, dignified conquest, the conquest that two people have over one another in love and mutual adoration.

When all is said and done, Ulysses is a simple love story.