Episode 17 — Ithaca

Two a.m. Bloom and Stephen walk through empty streets to 7 Eccles Street. Bloom has forgotten his key and so, with Stephen waiting, he climbs over the area railings and drops into the basement steps. The novel's opening parallel — Mulligan keeping the tower key — is closed. Bloom lets Stephen in through the front door. They go to the kitchen, where he puts the kettle on the hob and makes them both cocoa.

The chapter is written entirely in catechism — question and answer, in the voice of a cold scientific examiner. "What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?" The voice describes everything with a precision that is sometimes funny, sometimes moving. The volume of water in the kettle. The trajectories of their two streams of urine in the back garden under the constellations. Bloom's budget for the day, item by item. The contents of his locked drawer, including a letter from his father before his suicide. His thoughts on Molly's adultery — equanimity, not rage; the act, the catechism reports, is "more than inevitable, irreparable."

Stephen declines Bloom's invitation to stay the night and walks away into the pre-dawn dark; the bells of St George's church chime as he goes. Bloom comes back into the empty kitchen. He bumps into the rearranged furniture (Molly has had Boylan in the parlour; she has shifted the sofa). He climbs the stairs and gets into bed beside Molly. She wakes. He tells her, partially, about the day. He kisses her two plump rumpsmellow yellow furrowed melons of her bottom. He asks her — the chapter's last gesture, a pattern reversal — to bring him breakfast in bed in the morning. He falls asleep, his head at her feet. The chapter's final image is a black dot — a full stop the size of the world.