subsequent thought-fragment triggers something else. But again, Joyce is not concerned with logic but with experience; he is not interested in objectivity but immediacy. In other words, it was Joyce's goal to replicate as honestly as he could the way people actually think and feel and perceive. We are so used to the various conventions and devices that have come to characterize our literature over its long history that we take them for granted; we scarcely realize that life is not really "plotted" like a Shakespearean play. Joyce realized this, however, and sought to fix it. Within the body of Ulysses, Joyce incorporates a play, a budget, musical notation, newspaper headlines, several sets of song lyrics and a parody of the Roman Catholic catechism. The point is to pull all these assorted tidbits of Dublin life together to provide a real flavor of what it was like. Joyce himself said, "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book" (Joyce, quoted in Delaney, 10). A more traditional writer might have also given some aid in explaining what it all means, but Joyce, raised in the mystery of Irish Catholicism and the passionate irrationalism of Irish politics, prefers to leave the interpretation up to the reader.It is impossible to get away from Catholicism in any of Joyce's works; his symbolism in Ulysses in particular is full of allusions to the Mass, to the Church Fathers, to the everyday events and passing thoughts of Catholic life, which is so much a part of the cultural landscape of Ireland. Joyce left the Church as he left his native land, physically removing himself from it and intellectually disavowing any allegiance to it in his adult life -- but by that time Catholicism had carved deep inroads into his soul. McCoy and Harlan point out the significance of Joyce's protagonist in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, being Jewish by birth; "as a...
