empt to thematically evoke Homer's Odyssey, whose hero Ulysses (today generally called Odysseus) also made an epic journey of self-discovery. Yet it is not only the Greek classics to which Joyce has turned for inspiration, but the medieval Irish classics as well. One has only to read any cycle of medieval Celtic myth (such as the Irish Noinden Ulad, or the Welsh Mabinogen) to observe the same extraordinary structure at work there. The episodic formlessness of the Irish mythological epics heavily influenced the choice of form -- or, some would say, the lack thereof -- that was begun in Joyce's earlier works and brought to full fruition in Ulysses. The story line in either of these cycles flits from one anecdote to another in a manner that foreshadows Joyce's own stream-of-consciousness technique. In addition, Joyce's words are arranged not in a rational manner but with a wild, intuitive Irishness, with as much emphasis on the magic of language as there is on its intellectual logic. We can see an example of this in Molly Bloom's ruminations in the final chapter, which consists of one single sentence extending for forty pages, with thought falling on thought like leaves piling up in the autumn. Consider just a fragment of that passage: "Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her mentholated spirit. . . ." (Joyce, 738). In these passages, scenes are scarcely in view long enough to be recognizable before another succeeds them. There is, of course, a logical train to one's stream-of-consciousness; this thought-fragment leads to that one, and that...
