hal’s Reviews > Ulysses > Status Update

“Over the course of one June day in Dublin in the year 1904 (“Bloomsday”), a father finds a kind of son, and the son a kind of father, each of which they had long needed without knowing. This forms the emotional core of Ulysses. The Odysseus figure here is Jewish Dubliner Leopold Bloom, while his wife Molly stands as Calypso at the novel’s commencement and Penelope at its conclusion. Telemachus is Stephen Dedalus, the arrogant and brilliant intellectual hero of Joyce’s earlier, semi-autobiographical work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Structurally, the novel follows the episodes of the Odyssey, with Joyce giving them directly Homeric titles such as “Lotus Eaters”, “Lestrygonians”, “Scylla and Charybdis”, “Oxen of the Sun”, and so on.”

when the only things i’d heard were that Ulysses was long and confusing, this was the perfect explanation to pique my interest!!! we’ll see!