Ulysses — who's who

A thirty-eight-year-old advertising canvasser of Hungarian-Jewish descent. Lives at 7 Eccles Street with his wife Molly. Their infant son Rudy died at eleven days old, eleven years before the novel opens, and the marriage has not been the same since. Bloom is curious, kind, scientifically minded, mildly cuckolded, and quietly grieving. He likes the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He carries a potato in his pocket as a charm. The novel follows his consciousness for most of fourteen hours and finds, in the texture of one ordinary man's attention, a hero Homer could not have imagined.

Born Marion Tweedy in Gibraltar to a Spanish-Jewish mother and an Irish father, now a thirty-three-year-old professional singer in Dublin. Spends the afternoon of June 16 in bed with her concert promoter Blazes Boylan. Sensual, sharp, funny, and intelligent in a way most of the men in the book do not register. Her closing monologue — eight unpunctuated sentences across forty-five pages, drifting through memory, lust, marriage, and the line between them — is the most famous passage in modernist fiction and the novel's last word on what consciousness is.

The Blooms' fifteen-year-old daughter, working as a photographer's assistant in the country town of Mullingar. Present in the novel only through her cheerful letter to her father in episode 4 and through her parents' thoughts during the day. She mentions a young student named Bannon she has met; Bloom is faintly worried by the mention. Her growing up is one of the quiet sources of grief in the household — the only surviving child, no longer a child, and now a girl living away from home.

A Dublin man-about-town and concert promoter, organizing Molly's upcoming singing tour. Confident, unreflective, sexually direct, and uninteresting on the inside. Bloom knows the affair is happening. Bloom knows Boylan has an appointment at his house at four o'clock. He watches a clock cross four and keeps walking. Boylan appears physically only briefly — picking up a basket of fruit and a bottle of port on Grafton Street, jingling through the Ormond Hotel bar at four-fifteen, riding a hansom — but his presence shadows every scene Bloom navigates from morning to night.

A twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher and occasional poet, returned from a year in Paris when his mother fell ill. Refused to pray at her deathbed and has been haunted by the refusal ever since. The novel inherits him from Joyce's earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Brilliant, proud, articulate, broke, spiritually homeless. He is Telemachus looking for a father he cannot quite name; his own actual father, the drunken Simon Dedalus, is everywhere in the city he is trying to leave.

A medical student who shares the Martello tower at Sandycove with Stephen and the English visitor Haines. Opens the novel intoning a parody of the Mass while shaving on the parapet — "Introibo ad altare Dei." Brilliant, mocking, bawdy, corrosive. Calls Stephen "Kinch, the knife-blade." Has called Stephen's mother "beastly dead." Pockets the tower key at the end of episode 1, locking Stephen out of the only roof he has. Reappears at the National Library in episode 9 to undercut Stephen's Shakespeare lecture. Joyce based him on his real-life friend and rival Oliver St. John Gogarty, and clearly never forgave him.

The Englishman staying in the Martello tower who has been raving in his sleep about a black panther — with a gun. His casual imperialism and earnest tourist-anthropology — collecting Irish folklore for an Oxford project — irritate Stephen intensely; he watches the old milkwoman defer to Haines and burns. Stephen, by the end of episode 1, has decided not to come back to the tower because of him. Reappears in the Wandering Rocks vignettes buying a book of Irish folklore at a stall.

Stephen's father — a charming, sentimental, drunken tenor in slow social and financial decline. Drifts through Dublin trading on old connections and old friends while his children at home go hungry. Rides in the funeral carriage with Bloom in episode 6 and weeps passing his dead wife's grave on the way to Glasnevin. Sings "M'appari" from Flotow's Martha with heartbreaking beauty in the Ormond Hotel bar in episode 11. He is the actual father Stephen is trying to leave, and the kind of father Bloom would have welcomed having.

Headmaster of the school in Dalkey where Stephen teaches a listless history class. Pays Stephen his wages — three pounds twelve — and lectures him on thrift ("I paid my way"), history, and the Jews, who, Deasy is sure, have ruined every nation that admitted them. Gives Stephen a letter about foot-and-mouth disease to deliver to the newspapers. His self-satisfied Orangeism and casual antisemitism foreshadow the prejudice Bloom will face all day. The novel's Nestor — old, opinionated, generous with bad advice.

A Dubliner who has drunk himself to death and whose funeral, in episode 6, sets the day's social geometry for Bloom. His coffin is carried to Glasnevin Cemetery while the men in the carriage — Bloom, Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, Mr. Power — talk about death, suicide, and old grievances. His widow and children become the practical errand of Bloom's day; Bloom is trying to help the family collect the insurance money. He returns as a grotesque ghost in the Circe hallucinations of episode 15, rising from his coffin to speak to the living.

One of the Dubliners in the funeral carriage with Bloom in episode 6. Tactful — steers the conversation away from suicide when it veers there, knowing Bloom's father killed himself with poison at a hotel in Ennis. Spends part of episode 10 collecting money for the Dignam family with Jack Power and Crofton. Hustles Bloom into a waiting cab in episode 12 as the Citizen turns dangerous. The novel's clearest portrait of ordinary Dublin decency, kept on his feet under his own private burdens at home.

An enormous, drunk, mangy Fenian who holds court in Barney Kiernan's pub with his mangy dog Garryowen at his feet, ranting about Irish nationalism, the Saxon, the Jews, the Italians, and anyone else who is not Irish in the specific way he means. Turns his venom on Bloom for being a Jew. As Bloom's carriage pulls away at five p.m. he hurls a biscuit tin after it — the novel's one-eyed Polyphemus, and Joyce's most savage portrait of bigotry dressed up as patriotism.

A young Dublin woman, twenty-two, slightly lame, the daughter of a drunk, sitting on Sandymount Strand at dusk while Bloom watches her from a distance during a fireworks display for the Mirus charity bazaar. Episode 13 is written largely in her interior monologue in the prose style of late-Victorian women's magazines — a consciousness shaped almost entirely by the romantic fiction it has consumed. She leans back on the rocks for the dark-suited stranger watching her. When she stands to leave, we learn she has a limp.

Runs the brothel in the red-light district known to the novel as nighttown — the streets off Mecklenburgh Street north of the river — where Stephen ends up drunk on the night of June 16. In Bloom's hallucinatory vision in episode 15 she transforms into the masculine "Bello," dominating and humiliating him in a long set-piece of submission and feminization — the Circe who turns men into swine. Bloom eventually recovers his self-possession; the hallucination dissolves; the Bella who runs the actual house ejects them out into the street.

The Jesuit superior of Belvedere College. Opens episode 10 walking through Dublin from his presbytery toward the suburb of Artane on an errand of mercy for the Dignam children, intending to find one of them a place at the local school. His serene, self-satisfied progress through the city provides the episode's anchoring perspective and Joyce's most pointed portrait of clerical complacency. The viceregal cavalcade closes the episode at the same register — sacred and secular Dublin, both equally smooth, both equally indifferent.

A bass baritone with an enormous frame and a booming voice that fills the bar. Sings "The Croppy Boy" — the Fenian ballad about a young Irish rebel betrayed by a yeoman captain disguised as a priestly confessor — in the Ormond Hotel bar in episode 11 and moves the listeners deeply. Reappears at Barney Kiernan's pub in episode 12 in the Citizen's circle. Part of the musical Dublin of barflies and tenors the novel honours even as it watches them drink themselves into decline.

A journalist of sorts who hangs around the newspaper offices cracking riddles and looking for free drinks. A familiar Dublin parasite trading wit for survival, with no fixed purpose or income. Drifts through episode 7 in the editor's room with the other hangers-on, through episode 10 in the Wandering Rocks vignettes mooching and gossiping, and into episode 14 at the maternity hospital with the medical students. His presence is one of the novel's steady ambient hums of decayed Dublin talent.

A lawyer whose career is in ruins. Haunts the newspaper offices in episode 7 hoping for work or a loan from the editor Crawford, and is brushed off. Recites a famous courtroom speech of Seymour Bushe's with practised eloquence, and for a long moment is the man he used to be in front of his old peers. Reappears at Barney Kiernan's pub in episode 12, contributing occasional legal observations as the Citizen escalates. One of the novel's portraits of decayed Dublin talent, kept on his feet by old performances.

Sits in Davy Byrne's pub at lunchtime in episode 8 and quizzes Bloom about Molly's singing career and Boylan's concert tour — touching exactly the subject Bloom is trying not to think about over his Gorgonzola sandwich. He is asking about the Belfast bookings; Bloom is patient and evasive. The novel's portrait of how Dublin gossip works: well-meaning, relentless, faintly damp at the nose, and uncannily accurate about whom it wounds. The book is full of men like him; Flynn is the species at its purest.

An old friend of Bloom's — once nearly a girlfriend — whom he meets on Westmoreland Street in episode 8. Tells him about her husband Denis's latest obsession: an anonymous postcard reading "U.P.: up" that Denis is now walking to a law office to sue over. Bloom remembers she was once attractive and wonders, briefly, what might have been if he had married her instead of Molly. He wishes her well and walks on. One of the novel's small "what if" doors, gently closed.