Episode 14 — Oxen of the Sun

Ten p.m., the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. Bloom has come to ask after a friend of Molly's, Mina Purefoy, in her third day of labour. He is admitted to the residents' common room, where, to his surprise, he finds Stephen Dedalus drinking with a group of medical students — Buck Mulligan, Haines, Vincent Lynch, Punch Costello, Dixon — and the bibulous Lenehan. Stephen is drunk and getting drunker. Bloom, who has been watching out for him in his own head since the library, sits down with them. He is the only sober man in the room.

The chapter is the novel's most aggressive single experiment. It runs the entire history of English prose styles in chronological pastiche: Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, medieval Latin-and-Saxon, the Mandeville traveller's tale, Malory, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Junius, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle, Newman, Pater, and finally a chaotic mash of contemporary slang, dialect, drunken babble, and an American religious revival tract. As the prose evolves, the men get drunker. The correspondence is to Odysseus's crew slaughtering the cattle of Helios — a sin against fertility, against the womb labouring upstairs.

In the middle of the prose orgy, Mina Purefoy's baby is finally born — a healthy boy. The men below are too drunk to notice. The chapter ends with the students staggering out of the hospital toward Burke's pub, then on toward Nighttown. Bloom is still mostly sober. He has decided that someone has to keep an eye on Stephen. He follows them out. The closing pages dissolve into the American revivalist voice — "Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences!" — and the men spill into the streets.