Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - English Ulysses Ulysses Many novelists directly reflect their life stories and personal circumstances in their works, so closely that the works may seem autobiographical. Although there are autobiographical parallels between James Joyce's life and that of his characters in Ulysses, the novel's scattered autobiographical details are more in the line of delightful puzzles to be ferreted out, rather than direct insights into Joyce's life. What is really important in Ulysses is not the ties to Joyce's personal experience; it is the way he uses his distinctively Irish experience to comment on the human condition in general. We think of Joyce as an Irish writer, and it may be surprising to learn that he left his native land as a relatively young man, feeling that its religion was constricting and its politics futile. He concluded, in short, that his country had given him nothing of value, and that he could only gain what he personally needed as a writer by ruthlessly divorcing himself from his Irish past. Ironically, however, every book Joyce wrote throughout his life would be set in the Dublin of his childhood, and Ulysses, in particular, is permeated with the sights, sounds, flavor and smells of Joyce's Irish boyhood. In the process of showing us his Ireland, Joyce taught us more about the Irish mind than any other writer before or since. In Ulysses, the reader follows the hero, Leopold Bloom, as he circumnavigates Dublin, eventually making his way out in the morning and home at the end of the day. We meet Leopold's wife Molly and his friend Stephen Dedalus, as well as "hundreds of other Dubliners as they walk the streets, meet and talk, then talk some more in restaurants and pubs. All this activity seems random, a record of urban happenstance. But nothing in Ulysses is truly random. Beneath the surface realism of the novel, its apparently artless transcription of life's flow, lurks a complicated plan" (Gray, 102). Joyce called his novel Ulysses as a conscious attempt 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 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 an Irish Jew [Bloom] is both citizen and alien. In his wanderings around Dublin he meets many people whom he knows, but their Catholicism makes them strangers even as they are familiar" (McCoy & Harlan, 244). This is an eloquent evocation of the human condition in the twentieth century -- Joyce's century --, which has been overwhelmingly characterized by alienation. Traditional myth, such as the Homeric stories in which Ulysses has its roots, sought to romanticize the hero and transform his adventures into myth. Joyce, on the other hand, deliberately tried to de-romanticize his hero by making it almost impossible to see him in a heroic vein. Bloom is not handsome; he is not dashing; he is not adventurous. He is not the son of a god, or even a king; he has neither power nor position nor wealth. He is Everyman, living a thoroughly mundane existence in a prosaic world. Yet Joyce's novel forms the perfect backdrop for such a character, because his style of writing enables us to get under Bloom's skin in a way that would never have been possible with a more traditional hero and a more traditional method of storytelling. We are meant to see Homer's characters from a distance, as larger than life; we are meant to see Leopold Bloom from the inside out. Only in this way can we discern his humble heroism, and make the analogy that there is that same sort of heroism in us all. Because we can now see the common man as heroic, Joyce took the role originally played by Homer's Odysseus and cast a common man. Because he no longer subscribed to a traditional code of metaphysics, he brought in snatches of nearly every creed ever known to man and allows us to see they are essentially all one. Because he no longer wishes to romanticize his hero by putting him on a sailing ship in search of great adventures, Joyce puts him on a Dublin street surrounded by trades people and whores. Consequently, while Ulysses is not autobiographical in the literal way that Portrait was -- for example, Joyce himself was not a Jewish ad-salesman like Leopold Bloom -- it clearly reflects Joyce's Irish experience and his hopes and fears for his country and its people. The Ireland Joyce paints in Ulysses may be narrow-minded and bigoted, he argues, but on an individual basis its people are great of heart and full of life. It is no accident that the book ends with Molly's great life-affirming "yes". Leopold Bloom goes out on June 16, 1904 to discover the world, and finds it all in on the streets of Dublin before returning home safe and sound. Set amidst the dissonant and strident sounds of the modern city, Ulysses is a novel that could not take place any time or any place else. Bibliography: Works Cited: Delaney, Frank. James Joyce's Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. (New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981). Gray, Paul. "James Joyce: His 'Ulysses' Baffled Readers and Challenged Aspiring Fiction Writers; It Also Revolutionized 20th Century Fiction." (1998). Time, June 8, Vol. 151, No. 22, pp.102. Joyce, James. Ulysses. (New York : Vintage Press Edition, 1961). McCoy, Kathleen, and Judith Harlan. English Literature From 1785. (New York : HarperCollins, 1992). Word Count: 1484
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