Ulysses: a first reading, and the apparatus built around it

The Character Map

Ulysses — The Character Map

Base document 01 · A roster, a relational map, and an episode-by-episode census Joyce, Ulysses (1922). One day: Thursday, 16 June 1904, Dublin, roughly 8 a.m. to 2 a.m.

How this document is organised

Four concentric circles of cast, then the relations between them, then a census of who stands where in each of the eighteen episodes.

Episodes are numbered 1–18 and named by their Homeric titles. Joyce never printed those titles — they come from the schemas he circulated privately (Linati, 1920; Gilbert, 1930) and are used here only as scaffolding, as they are in most criticism. Editions that print three parts and no titles (Penguin among them) are following Joyce's own architecture.

References are by episode number, not page, so this document travels across editions.

The architecture in one page

Part Episodes Whose day Homeric arc
I — Telemachia 1–3 Stephen The son, dispossessed, seeking
II — Wanderings 4–15 Bloom, then Bloom and Stephen The wanderer, en route
III — Nostos 16–18 Both, then Molly The homecoming

The hours: 8 a.m. (1 and 4 run in parallel), 10, 11, 12 noon, 1 p.m., 2, 3, 4, 5, 8 p.m., 10 p.m., midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. — and then Penelope, for which Joyce left the hour blank. The last episode sits outside the clock.

CIRCLE I — The Three

Everything in the book is organised around these three consciousnesses. Two are wandering; one is in bed.

Leopold Bloom

Stephen Dedalus

Molly Bloom (Marion Tweedy)

CIRCLE II — The Shaping Presences

Twelve figures who bend the day, even when they are absent from it.

Buck Mulligan (Malachi) — medical student, early twenties. Blasphemous, brilliant, cruel, endlessly performing. Shares the tower, takes the key, calls Stephen's mother "beastly dead." Modelled on Oliver St John Gogarty. The false friend. Homer: Antinous, chief suitor.

Blazes Boylan (Hugh E. Boylan) — concert impresario, Molly's manager and lover. Flashy straw hat, red carnation, swagger, potency, coarseness. The exact inverse of Bloom. Never speaks to Bloom in the entire book. Homer: the suitors.

Simon Dedalus — Stephen's father. Widower, drinker, wit, fine tenor voice, sentimental about the past, financially ruined, neglects his daughters. Present but inadequate — the biological father whose failure creates the vacancy Bloom fills.

Haines — Oxford Englishman lodging at the tower, collecting Irish folklore in a mild colonial way. Nightmare about a black panther. Stands in for England. In one Gothic apparition he carries a portfolio of Celtic literature in one hand and a phial marked Poison in the other.

Milly Bloom — 15 (birthday 15 June, the day before). Away in Mullingar learning the photography trade, being courted by Alec Bannon. Never appears on stage — only a letter, and her parents' thoughts. Bloom's ache about her growing up runs parallel to his ache about Molly.

Rudy Bloom — the son who died at eleven days old. Appears once, as a vision at the very end of episode 15, aged about eleven, in an Eton suit with a lamb in his pocket, reading a Hebrew book right to left, not seeing his father. The emotional centre of the novel.

Martha Clifford — Bloom's epistolary flirtation, writing to "Henry Flower." Exists as a letter, and then as an accusing hallucination (where she gives her real name as Peggy Griffin). Bloom's own concealed sexual life, running under his grievance.

Gerty MacDowell — young woman on Sandymount Strand; late teens. Lame, romantic, poor, with a drunk father, imagining her life in the language of magazine fiction. Performs for Bloom on the beach and knows exactly what she is doing. Homer: Nausicaa. Her grandfather Giltrap owns the Citizen's dog.

The Citizen — unnamed archnationalist in Barney Kiernan's pub. Huge, bellowing, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, with a mangy dog. Modelled on Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Throws a biscuit tin at Bloom. Homer: Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant — monocular vision as bigotry.

Mr Deasy (Garrett Deasy) — headmaster of the Dalkey school. Unionist, pompous, proud of paying his way, casually anti-Semitic, writing letters to the papers about foot-and-mouth disease. Joyce plants his anti-Semitism two episodes before introducing the Jewish hero. Homer: Nestor, the wise counsellor — ironised.

Bella Cohen — brothel madam in Nighttown, with a sprouting moustache. Becomes masculine "Bello" and stages Bloom's total degradation. Homer: Circe, who turns men to swine.

Paddy Dignam — the dead man. Buried at Glasnevin this morning, leaving a widow, children, and no money. Present as a corpse, as a spirit in a theosophy parody, as a séance apparition, and as an insurance problem. The day's official death.

CIRCLE III — The Dublin Chorus

The city itself: roughly thirty men and women who recur, cross, gossip, drink, and carry the novel's texture. One line each.

Martin Cunningham — Dublin Castle official; kindly; organises the fund for Dignam's widow; knows about Bloom's father's suicide and shields him from the topic; his own wife is a drunkard. Jack Power — funeral carriage, Dignam fund; keeps a barmaid mistress while his wife is ill (Molly knows). Joe Hynes — journalist; reports the funeral; mishears "the man in the macintosh" as a surname and prints M'Intosh into history; owes Bloom money. Ned Lambert — corn merchant, laugher, present at funeral, newspaper, pub. Tom Kernan — tea traveller, Protestant convert, pleased with his own phrasing. Lenehan — sports journalist and sponger; tips the wrong horse (Sceptre); tells a grubby story about groping Molly in a carriage. Corny Kelleher — undertaker's man, suspected police informer; talks the police out of arresting Stephen at the end of Nighttown. M'Coy — buttonholes Bloom to have his name entered at the funeral; borrows suitcases and doesn't return them. Bantam Lyons — misreads Bloom's "I was just going to throw it away" as a tip on the horse Throwaway, which then wins at 20-to-1 and convinces half of Dublin that Bloom is a secret winner who won't stand a round. Nosey Flynn — permanent fixture at Davy Byrne's, dripping nose, knows everyone's business. Davy Byrne — publican of the "moral pub" where Bloom eats gorgonzola and burgundy. Alf Bergan — pub wit, brings the hangman's letter. J. J. O'Molloy — declining barrister, borrowing money, quoting oratory. Myles Crawford — inflamed editor of the Evening Telegraph. Professor MacHugh — classicist windbag; recites the Taylor speech (Egypt/England, Israel/Ireland). O'Madden Burke — newspaper hanger-on with a graceful phrase for everything. AE / George Russell — real poet, theosophist, Platonist; dismisses biographical readings of art as "the speculation of schoolboys." Stephen owes him money (A.E.I.O.U.). John Eglinton, Thomas Lyster, Richard Best — the National Library men, real people, sceptical audience for Stephen's Shakespeare theory. Vincent Lynch — Stephen's cynical companion in the hospital and the brothel; abandons him at the end. Richie Goulding — Stephen's uncle (his mother's brother); dines with Bloom in the Ormond — a quiet crossing of the two families. Ben Dollard — enormous bass singer, "base barreltone," trousers borrowed from the Blooms years ago and far too tight. Father Bob Cowley — defrocked-ish priest, pianist, in debt. Miss Lydia Douce (bronze) and Miss Mina Kennedy (gold) — the Ormond barmaids; the sirens. Douce snaps her garter for the customers. Father Conmee, S.J. — real Jesuit; opens the city-wide episode with smooth, complacent piety; had taught Stephen at Clongowes. The Earl of Dudley — William Humble Ward, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland; his cavalcade closes the same episode. Church at the top, Empire at the bottom. Josie Breen (née Powell) — Bloom's old flame from before his marriage; now married to Denis Breen, who is touring solicitors over an anonymous postcard reading "U.p: up." Dilly Dedalus — Stephen's sister, hungry, buying a French primer with pennies she can't spare; the sharpest indictment of Simon in the book. (Sisters Katey, Boody, Maggy.) Master Patrick Dignam — the dead man's son, carrying pork steaks, thinking about purgatory and his new mourning suit. Mina Purefoy — three days in labour; delivers a son in episode 14; never seen. Nurse Callan and Dr Dixon — the maternity hospital staff; Dixon once treated Bloom for a bee sting. Alec Bannon — the student courting Milly in Mullingar; turns up in the hospital boasting about his "photo girl" — Bloom's daughter — in front of Bloom. Zoe Higgins, Kitty Ricketts, Florry Talbot — the three women in Bella Cohen's house. Zoe shares a surname with Bloom's mother and takes his potato talisman. Private Carr and Private Compton — British soldiers; Carr knocks Stephen unconscious. Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman — Gerty's friends on the strand; Cissy reappears in Nighttown with the soldiers. The blind stripling — a blind piano tuner whom Bloom helps across the street, and who returns for his tuning fork; one of Bloom's small unwitnessed kindnesses. Murphy, the sailor — spinner of tall tales in the cabman's shelter; a fraudulent Odysseus, home from a sea he may never have crossed. "Skin-the-Goat" Fitzharris — reputed keeper of the cabman's shelter; historically one of the Invincibles, who drove the getaway car after the 1882 Phoenix Park murders. Now pours cocoa. Garryowen — the Citizen's dog; actually belongs to Gerty MacDowell's grandfather. The Man in the Macintosh (M'Intosh) — the thirteenth mourner at the funeral, whom nobody can identify. Named into existence by a journalist's mishearing. Still unexplained in the final catechism. The one unsolved thing in a book that knows everything.

CIRCLE IV — The Dead and the Absent

Characters who never walk the streets but shape everything.

Rudolph Virág / Bloom — Bloom's father. Suicide by poison, Ennis, 1886. His note: No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns. Returns as an apparition in Nighttown to reproach his son in Yiddish-inflected English. Ellen Higgins — Bloom's mother; gave him the potato. May Dedalus — Stephen's mother; dead about a year. Rises through the floor in Nighttown, green with gravemould, begging him to repent, and gets Non serviam! in reply. Rudy Bloom — see Circle II. The vision. Major Brian Tweedy — Molly's father, Gibraltar garrison. Lunita Laredo — Molly's mother; barely mentioned, and Molly mourns even the loss of her lovely name. Lieutenant Harry Mulvey — Molly's first love, Gibraltar. Mrs Riordan ("Dante") — lodged with the Blooms at the City Arms Hotel and was the governess-figure of Stephen's childhood in A Portrait of the Artist. A hinge between the two households. Charles Stewart Parnell — dead 1891; the great nationalist leader destroyed by an adultery scandal. Haunts the political talk; some believe he is not dead at all. Shakespeare — not a character, but effectively a presence: Stephen's theory makes him the ghost-father and the cuckold, and his face appears in a Nighttown mirror wearing the horns of the hatrack.

THE RELATIONAL MAP

Households

7 Eccles Street — Leopold, Molly, the cat. Milly away in Mullingar. Rudy dead. Boylan arrives at four. It is the only house in the novel we are shown from the inside, and both spouses enter it today by irregular means: Boylan through the front door, Bloom over the area railings, having forgotten his key.

The Martello Tower, Sandycove — Stephen, Mulligan, Haines. Stephen pays the rent; Mulligan takes the key. Stephen leaves and does not go back.

The Dedalus house — Simon, and the daughters he is failing to feed. May dead. Stephen absent.

Gibraltar (remembered) — Major Tweedy, Lunita Laredo, young Molly, Mulvey.

The threads that matter

Thread Between Nature
The marriage Bloom — Molly Sixteen years; frozen carnally since Rudy; alive in memory
The affair Molly — Boylan Consummated at 4 p.m., offstage, never shown
The correspondence Bloom — Martha Secret, epistolary, under an alias; his own concealment
The lost son Bloom — Rudy The absence that makes the book
The failed father Stephen — Simon Blood, and insufficiency
The dead mother Stephen — May Guilt, refusal, Non serviam
The usurper Stephen — Mulligan The key, the mockery, the tower
The elective kinship Bloom — Stephen The spine of the novel

The spine

The book spends nine hundred pages moving these two men toward each other:

Bloom lost a son. Stephen has a father who fails him. They pass in a newspaper office (7), a library (9), and the streets (10) without meeting. They finally converge in a maternity hospital (14), walk together through a brothel quarter (15), sit in a cabman's shelter (16), drink cocoa and urinate under the stars (17) — and then Stephen declines a bed and walks away into the dark, and we never learn whether they meet again.

The refusal of a sentimental reunion is the point. It is a near-communion, and Joyce will not fake it into more.

The crossings

The quiet delight of the book — the links the characters themselves never notice.

EPISODE CENSUS

Who is where, and what happens between them. (H) = appears as hallucination or apparition rather than in the flesh.

PART I — TELEMACHIA

1 · Telemachus — 8 a.m. — The Martello Tower, Sandycove

Present: Stephen, Buck Mulligan, Haines, the old milkwoman. Encounter: Mulligan mocks Stephen's dead mother, borrows his handkerchief and his wit, and takes the key. The milkwoman does not recognise her own language when Haines speaks Irish to her, and defers to the Englishman. Ends: Usurper.

2 · Nestor — 10 a.m. — Mr Deasy's school, Dalkey

Present: Stephen, Mr Deasy, the schoolboys (Cochrane, Armstrong, Talbot, and Sargent, the weak one Stephen helps with sums and pities). Encounter: Stephen teaches Pyrrhus badly, collects his wages, takes Deasy's letter about cattle disease, and receives an anti-Semitic joke. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

3 · Proteus — 11 a.m. — Sandymount Strand

Present: Stephen alone. Passing cocklepickers with a dog; in memory, Kevin Egan in Paris and the Goulding household. Encounter: none. Pure consciousness. The dog shifts through forms; the sea is "our great sweet mother."

PART II — THE WANDERINGS

4 · Calypso — 8 a.m. — 7 Eccles Street and Upper Dorset Street

Present: Bloom, Molly (in bed), the cat, Dlugacz the pork butcher. Encounter: breakfast, the kidney, metempsychosis, Milly's letter — and Boylan's letter to "Mrs Marion Bloom," in a bold hand, which Bloom does not open. The clock restarts: this hour has already happened, in the tower.

5 · Lotus-Eaters — 10 a.m. — Westland Row, All Hallows, Sweny's, the baths

Present: Bloom, M'Coy, Bantam Lyons, Sweny the chemist, the congregation. Encounter: Bloom collects Martha's letter as Henry Flower; watches Mass as a fascinated outsider; unknowingly gives Lyons the Throwaway "tip." Ends anticipating the bath — the ultimate lotus.

6 · Hades — 11 a.m. — Sandymount to Glasnevin Cemetery

Present: Bloom, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus (in the carriage); at the grave — Joe Hynes, Corny Kelleher, Ned Lambert, Tom Kernan, John Henry Menton, Father Coffey, and the man in the macintosh. Encounter: the carriage passes Stephen (Simon complains about Mulligan) and Boylan (Bloom looks at his fingernails). Talk turns to suicide; Bloom sits silent, remembering his father. He thinks of Rudy. He stays turned toward life.

7 · Aeolus — 12 noon — The Freeman's Journal, Prince's Street

Present: Bloom (chasing the Keyes advertisement), Myles Crawford, Professor MacHugh, Ned Lambert, Simon Dedalus, J. J. O'Molloy, Lenehan, Joe Hynes, O'Madden Burke — and Stephen, arriving with Deasy's letter. Encounter: the first near-miss. Bloom and Stephen are in the same building and do not meet. The men declaim; MacHugh recites the Taylor speech, and Egypt stands for England while Israel stands for Ireland.

8 · Lestrygonians — 1 p.m. — Along the Liffey, the Burton, Davy Byrne's

Present: Bloom, Josie Breen, AE (passing in the street), Nosey Flynn, Davy Byrne, Paddy Leonard, Bantam Lyons, the blind stripling. Encounter: Bloom recoils from men feeding like animals in the Burton; retreats to a cheese sandwich; remembers Molly on Howth Head and the seedcake; helps a blind man cross the road; sees Boylan and bolts through a museum gate to avoid him. The prose fragments as his composure does.

9 · Scylla and Charybdis — 2 p.m. — The National Library

Present: Stephen, John Eglinton, AE, Thomas Lyster, Richard Best, Buck Mulligan. Bloom passes through on business. Encounter: the second near-miss — Mulligan sees Bloom and sneers. Stephen expounds his Hamlet theory: Shakespeare is the ghost, not the prince; the cuckolded father; the star over Cassiopeia; Shottery and Anne Hathaway.

10 · Wandering Rocks — 3 p.m. — All across Dublin, nineteen sections

Present: effectively the entire cast. Opens with Father Conmee (the Church), closes with the Viceroy's cavalcade (the Empire). In between: Corny Kelleher, the one-legged sailor, Molly's arm flinging a coin from the window, the Dedalus sisters, Boylan buying fruit for Molly, Artifoni and Stephen, Boylan's typist, Tom Rochford, Bloom at a bookcart choosing Sweets of Sin, Dilly and Simon, Tom Kernan, Stephen at the lapidary's window, Ben Dollard and Father Cowley, Cunningham and Power, Mulligan and Haines at the tearoom, the blind stripling, Master Patrick Dignam. Encounter: none, and all. Joyce cross-cuts fragments from one section into another to show simultaneity. This is a city, not a plot.

11 · Sirens — 4 p.m. — The Ormond Hotel bar

Present: Miss Douce (bronze), Miss Kennedy (gold), Bloom, Richie Goulding, Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard, Father Cowley, Lenehan, Boots the pageboy, the blind tuner — and Boylan, who leaves. Encounter: the hour of the betrayal. Bloom writes secretly to Martha while Simon sings the aria of lost love from Martha, and Boylan's jingling car carries him away to Molly. Written as a fugue, opening with a two-page overture of motifs. Ends with Bloom's flatulence timed to Robert Emmet's last words.

12 · Cyclops — 5 p.m. — Barney Kiernan's pub, Little Britain Street

Present: the nameless narrator (a foul-mouthed debt collector — the book's only first-person voice), the Citizen, Garryowen, Joe Hynes, Alf Bergan, Bob Doran, J. J. O'Molloy, Ned Lambert, John Wyse Nolan, Lenehan, Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, Crofton — and Bloom. Encounter: the confrontation. Bloom argues against force and hatred, says the opposite is love, and is laughed at. Attacked as an alien, he answers: Ireland. I was born here. Then: Christ was a jew like me. A biscuit tin is thrown; he ascends into heaven at an angle of forty-five degrees.

13 · Nausicaa — 8 p.m. — Sandymount Strand (Stephen's morning beach)

Present: Gerty MacDowell, Cissy Caffrey, Edy Boardman, the Caffrey twins, baby Boardman, Bloom; a Benediction service audible from the church. Encounter: Gerty displays herself; Bloom masturbates; a Roman candle bursts and the choir chants to the Virgin, all in the same instant. Then the novelette prose collapses into Bloom's flat voice: She's lame! — and he is kind about it. His watch has stopped at half past four.

14 · Oxen of the Sun — 10 p.m. — The National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street

Present: Bloom, Nurse Callan, Dr Dixon, Stephen, Lenehan, Lynch, Madden, Crotthers, Punch Costello, Buck Mulligan, Alec Bannon — and upstairs, unseen, Mina Purefoy giving birth. Encounter: they finally come together. Drunk students blaspheme against fertility while a woman labours overhead; thunder breaks; Stephen is terrified and Bloom calms him — the first fatherly act. Written as the history of English prose evolving through nine stages, in parallel with nine months of gestation.

15 · Circe — midnight — Nighttown (the brothel quarter)

Present, in the flesh: Stephen, Lynch, Bloom, Zoe Higgins, Bella/Bello Cohen, Kitty Ricketts, Florry Talbot, Cissy Caffrey, Privates Carr and Compton, the watch, Corny Kelleher. Present, as hallucination: Rudolph (H), Ellen (H), Molly (H), Gerty (H), Josie Breen (H), Martha (H), Boylan (H), Paddy Dignam (H), M'Intosh (H), Mulligan (H), Deasy (H), May Dedalus (H), Rudy (H) — and the soap, the fan, a waterfall, and the End of the World, all of which speak. Encounter: written as a play script. Bloom is tried, crowned emperor of a new Bloomusalem shaped like a pork kidney, burned, feminised, and degraded by Bello. Stephen's dead mother rises; he cries Non serviam! and smashes a chandelier; Carr knocks him down. Bloom stands over him, fends off the police, keeps watch — and sees Rudy.

PART III — THE NOSTOS

16 · Eumaeus — 1 a.m. — The cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge

Present: Bloom, Stephen, Murphy the sailor, "Skin-the-Goat" the keeper, jarvies, a streetwalker at the door. Encounter: Bloom buys Stephen coffee and a bun and talks at him. Written in deliberately exhausted, clichéd prose — the style is the hour. Three adultery stories are stacked: Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, a knife murder, and Bloom's own. Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly. They walk off arm in arm, watched from a distance by a driver who cannot hear a word.

17 · Ithaca — 2 a.m. — 7 Eccles Street

Present: Bloom, Stephen; Molly asleep upstairs. Encounter: the communion. Bloom has forgotten his key and breaks into his own house — keyless, like Stephen. They drink cocoa, compare their lives, urinate together in the garden under the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Stephen declines a bed and leaves. Bloom does his accounts, considers and rejects every revenge, gets into bed the wrong way round, and asks for breakfast. Written as a cold catechism of questions and answers. Who was M'Intosh? — unanswered. The final question is Where? and the answer is a large black dot.

18 · Penelope — no hour — the bed, 7 Eccles Street

Present: Molly, awake; Bloom asleep beside her. Encounter: none, and everything. Eight enormous unpunctuated sentences. Boylan is found coarse; Stephen is imagined as a refined fantasy; and the mind travels back through Gibraltar and Mulvey to Howth Head, the rhododendrons, the seedcake passed mouth to mouth, and he understood or felt what a woman is like — and the book ends on yes.

Trieste — Zurich — Paris, 1914–1921.

NOTES AND OPEN QUESTIONS

Things to verify against the text or decide editorially before this becomes a website.

  1. Molly's age — the novel contradicts itself. Present the contradiction rather than picking a number.
  2. Gerty's age — never stated precisely. Avoid asserting one.
  3. Rudy's age in the vision — died at eleven days in January 1894, which would make him ten and a half on Bloomsday; the vision calls him eleven. Another deliberate or careless slippage.
  4. Whether Simon and Stephen actually overlap in episode 7 — they are both in the newspaper offices, but the text is arranged so they do not visibly meet. Worth checking line by line if the site claims it.
  5. The sailor's initials in episode 16 vary between editions.
  6. Which characters count as "appearing" — Milly, Rudy, Martha, Mina Purefoy and the dead all shape the book without walking on. The site will need a consistent rule for present / remembered / hallucinated.
  7. The schemas — Linati and Gilbert disagree on some assignments. If organs, arts and colours are added later, pick one schema and say which.

Base document 01. Next candidates: the Homeric concordance (Odyssey → Ulysses, book by book); the map of Dublin locations; the day as a timeline; the eighteen styles; the motif index (the potato, the soap, Throwaway, the macintosh, metempsychosis, Agendath Netaim, the jingling car).