Episode 16 — Eumaeus

One a.m. The novel's pace shifts. Bloom and Stephen, the older man supporting the younger, walk slowly across the river toward a cabman's shelter under the Loop Line railway bridge — a small wooden hut where Dublin's late-night cabmen gather to drink coffee. The chapter is the longest in the novel after Circe and Penelope, and the slowest. The prose is deliberately exhausted. It is full of clichés, mixed metaphors, mistaken syntax — Joyce rendering the way two tired men talk to each other in the small hours when neither has the energy to find the right word.

In the shelter — run by a man rumoured to be Skin-the-Goat, the Phoenix Park assassin — Bloom buys Stephen coffee and a roll. Stephen barely eats. A red-bearded sailor named D.B. Murphy holds the floor with dubious tales of the South Seas: tattoos, sword-swallowers, knife fights, a postcard from Bolivia he produces as evidence. Bloom listens; Stephen is mostly silent. A young prostitute ejected from a pub passes by; Bloom tells Stephen, gently, to be careful of women in his condition.

Bloom is trying, throughout the chapter, to make a connection with Stephen and mostly failing. He talks about his political views, about Ireland, about Shakespeare, about his marriage — produces a faded photograph of Molly and shows it with proprietary pride. He talks about prudence, about the company of drinkers, about choosing your friends. Stephen says little. Toward the end Bloom invites Stephen home to 7 Eccles Street for cocoa. Stephen, after a long pause, accepts. They walk out together into the cold pre-dawn streets. The chapter's correspondence is to Eumaeus the swineherd — the loyal old hand who first receives Odysseus on his return.