Episode 12 — Cyclops

Five p.m., Barney Kiernan's pub off Little Britain Street. Bloom has come to meet Martin Cunningham about the insurance money for Paddy Dignam's widow. He is early. The chapter is narrated, for the first time in the novel, in a first-person voice — an unnamed Dublin debt-collector with a sharp, sarcastic, vernacular tone, who has wandered into the pub and is already drinking. He is unreliable about everything; his nickname for Bloom is "the prudent member." For once we are outside Bloom's head, in the talk of a Dubliner who finds Bloom faintly ridiculous.

At the bar, holding court, is the Citizen — an enormous, drunk, mangy Fenian with his dog Garryowen at his feet. He is denouncing the English, the Saxon, the Jews, the Italians, anyone who is not Irish in the specific way he means. The chapter is regularly interrupted by mock-heroic parodies of Dublin's many registers — courtroom reportage, scientific journals, parliamentary minutes, theosophical pamphlets — each escalating the absurdity. (One famous interpolation describes the dog Garryowen as a poet.)

The Citizen turns on Bloom. He sneers about Jews, about Bloom's name (originally Virag), about "those mongrel jews." Bloom answers him quietly. A nation, he says, is the same people living in the same place — or in different places. "And I belong to a race too," he says, "that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment." He goes further: "Christ was a jew like me." The Citizen, enraged, threatens him; Cunningham hustles Bloom into a waiting cab; as it pulls away the Citizen snatches a biscuit tin from the counter and hurls it after him. Bloom escapes. The chapter's closing parody describes him ascending into heaven "like a shot off a shovel." The Citizen is the novel's Cyclops; the biscuit tin is Polyphemus's rock.