Ulysses — chapter by chapter
All 18 episodes — one Dublin day in eighteen styles.
Joyce divided the novel into eighteen episodes and gave each one a Homeric name in private — the book itself does not print them. Episodes 1–3 follow Stephen Dedalus from breakfast to mid-morning. Episodes 4–6 begin again at eight a.m. with Bloom and follow him through breakfast, errands, and Paddy Dignam's funeral. Episodes 7–15 walk Bloom through midday, afternoon, and evening across Dublin, with Stephen drifting in and out of his orbit. Episodes 16–17 bring the two men together for an exhausted late-night conversation in a cabman's shelter and then in Bloom's kitchen. Episode 18 is Molly Bloom, alone in bed in the small hours, in the unbroken monologue that ends the book.
Episodes 1–3 · Telemachia
Stephen Dedalus from breakfast to mid-morning.
Episode 1
Eight a.m., the Martello tower at Sandycove. Buck Mulligan, a medical student in a yellow dressinggown, parodies the Catholic Mass while shaving on the parapet — "Introibo ad altare Dei." He needles Stephen Dedalus about his refusal, a year ago, to kneel at his dying mother's deathbed. The Englishman Haines makes earnest tourist-noises about Irish folklore. The three eat breakfast and walk down to the sea. Stephen hands Mulligan the tower key, hands him twopence, and decides, silently, that he is not coming back.
Appears: Stephen · Buck Mulligan · Haines
Episode 2
Mid-morning at Mr. Deasy's boys' school in Dalkey. Stephen teaches a history lesson on Pyrrhus, helps a slow boy with his sums, and collects his pay. The headmaster — an Ulsterman, Protestant, complacent — lectures him on thrift, history, and the Jews, who Deasy is certain have ruined every nation that admitted them. Stephen carries away three pounds twelve, a letter Deasy wants the newspapers to print on foot-and-mouth disease, and the line "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Appears: Stephen · Mr. Deasy
Episode 3
Eleven a.m., Sandymount Strand. Stephen walks alone back toward the city. The opening line is "Ineluctable modality of the visible." Aristotle on perception, his year in Paris, his dead mother, the cousins he was supposed to visit and walked past, two midwives, a dog. He composes four lines of poetry on a corner torn from Deasy's letter and picks his nose to see if anyone is watching. The chapter is almost entirely interior monologue — the technique the rest of the novel will perfect.
Appears: Stephen
Episodes 4–6 · Bloom's morning
The day begins again at eight a.m. — breakfast, post office, funeral.
Episode 4
Eight a.m. — the day begins again. Bloom in his kitchen at 7 Eccles Street, the cat at his feet. He fetches a pork kidney from Dlugacz the butcher's, brings Molly her breakfast tea in bed, hands her a letter from her lover Boylan confirming a four-o'clock visit, reads a cheerful letter from his daughter Milly in Mullingar, and visits the outhouse at the end of the garden with the newspaper. The interior monologue is now Bloom's — and unmistakably his.
Appears: Bloom · Molly · Milly
Episode 5
Ten a.m. Bloom on his way to Paddy Dignam's funeral. He picks up a secret love letter under the assumed name "Henry Flower" at the post office, dodges Boylan in the street by ducking into a doorway, wanders into All Hallows church to watch a communion service with a non-believer's curiosity, orders Molly's lotion at Sweny's the chemist, accidentally walks off with an unpaid bar of lemon soap that he will carry the rest of the day, and ends the episode soaking in the Turkish baths.
Appears: Bloom · Boylan
Episode 6
Eleven a.m. The funeral procession to Paddy Dignam's burial at Glasnevin Cemetery. Bloom rides in the third carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Mr. Power. The talk is the inconsequential talk of Dubliners going to a funeral — and turns toward the dangerous subject of suicide before Cunningham deftly steers it away. They pass Stephen on the road; Simon does not recognize his own son's back. They pass the spot where Bloom's father killed himself with poison eleven years ago. At the graveside Bloom thinks of his father and of his dead infant son Rudy.
Appears: Bloom · Simon Dedalus · Martin Cunningham · Paddy Dignam · Stephen (glimpsed)
Episodes 7–12 · Bloom in the city
Newspaper, lunch, library, streets, hotel bar, pub.
Episode 7
Noon at the Freeman's Journal offices on Prince's Street North. Bloom is there to renew an advertisement for the tea merchant Keyes with its particular crossed-keys design; Stephen, to deliver Mr. Deasy's letter on foot-and-mouth disease. They are in the same building for nearly an hour and do not meet. The chapter is interrupted by parodic newspaper headlines in capitals that mock the prose beneath them — the form coming apart in front of the reader for the first time.
Appears: Bloom · Stephen · Lenehan · J.J. O'Molloy
Episode 8
One p.m., lunchtime. Bloom walks through Dublin looking for food, his interior monologue in full flow over food, advertising, women, and a YMCA leaflet thrust at him on the bridge. A man named Bantam Lyons mishears him and rushes off to bet on the horse Throwaway. He meets Josie Breen on the street, is repulsed by the Burton restaurant, eats a Gorgonzola sandwich at Davy Byrne's pub, dodges Nosey Flynn's questions about Boylan, and helps a blind piano-tuner across the road on the way out.
Appears: Bloom · Josie Breen · Nosey Flynn
Episode 9
Two p.m. at the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. Stephen lectures the literary men on his theory that Hamlet is Shakespeare's autobiography — that Shakespeare is the ghost of King Hamlet and his dead son Hamnet the prince, and that Anne Hathaway, unfaithful with one of Shakespeare's brothers, is Gertrude. Brilliant, baroque, and (Stephen admits at the end) not believed. Buck Mulligan arrives and mocks him. Bloom passes through to check his ad. He and Stephen still do not meet.
Appears: Stephen · Buck Mulligan · Bloom (passing through)
Episode 10
Three p.m. The episode is structured as nineteen short vignettes, each following a different Dubliner through the same hour across the same streets, stitched by short interpolations from one vignette dropped into another. Father Conmee walks through the suburbs on an errand for the Dignam children; Boylan buys fruit and port for Molly; Stephen meets his starving sister Dilly outside a bookstall; Bloom hunts a book at a quayside stall and chooses Sweets of Sin. The viceregal cavalcade closes the episode by passing them all.
Appears: Father Conmee · Bloom · Boylan · Stephen · Simon Dedalus
Episode 11
Four p.m. at the Ormond Hotel bar on the north quay of the Liffey. The chapter opens with two pages of fragmentary phrases like the tuning-up of a fugue ("Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing"). Boylan stops in for a quick gin, jingling, and leaves at four-fifteen for Eccles Street; Bloom watches him go. Simon Dedalus sings "M'appari" from Martha; Ben Dollard sings "The Croppy Boy." Bloom writes a reply to Martha Clifford and slips out as Boylan reaches the house.
Appears: Bloom · Boylan · Simon Dedalus · Ben Dollard · Molly (in absentia)
Episode 12
Five p.m. at Barney Kiernan's pub off Little Britain Street, where Bloom has come to meet Cunningham about Paddy Dignam's insurance. The narrator is, for the first time in the novel, an unnamed Dublin debt-collector with a sarcastic vernacular voice. The Citizen, a Fenian nationalist with a mangy dog Garryowen, turns his bigotry on Bloom for being a Jew. Bloom answers him calmly — "Christ was a jew like me" — and escapes by carriage as the Citizen hurls a biscuit tin after him.
Appears: Bloom · The Citizen · Martin Cunningham · Ben Dollard · J.J. O'Molloy
Episodes 13–15 · Evening and night
Sandymount at dusk, the maternity hospital, nighttown.
Episode 13
Eight p.m. on Sandymount Strand at dusk — the same beach Stephen walked along nine hours earlier. The first half is in Gerty MacDowell's voice in the prose style of late-Victorian women's magazines; under the bursting fireworks of the Mirus charity bazaar she leans back on the rocks for the dark-suited stranger watching her from the other end of the strand. When she stands to leave, we learn she has a limp. The second half cuts to Bloom's tired post-coital monologue.
Appears: Bloom · Gerty MacDowell
Episode 14
Ten p.m. at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. Bloom checks on Molly's friend Mina Purefoy, in her third day of labour, and finds Stephen drinking with the medical students in the residents' common room. The episode runs through the entire history of English prose styles, chronologically — Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse through Sterne and Dickens to a contemporary American revivalist tract. The baby is born; the students leave for a pub; Bloom follows Stephen out into the night to keep him safe.
Appears: Bloom · Stephen · Buck Mulligan · Haines · Lenehan
Episode 15
Midnight in the brothel district off Mecklenburgh Street known to the novel as "nighttown." The chapter is staged as a hallucinatory play with character names in capitals, stage directions, and impossible scene changes between reality and hallucination. Bloom's shames erupt on stage; Bella Cohen transforms into the masculine "Bello" and dominates him; his dead son Rudy briefly appears. Stephen, hallucinating his dead mother's ghost, cries "Non serviam!" and smashes a chandelier. He is knocked down by an English soldier. Bloom picks him up.
Appears: Bloom · Stephen · Bella Cohen · Dignam (ghost)
Episodes 16–18 · Nostos
Cabman's shelter, Bloom's kitchen, Molly's bed.
Episode 16
One a.m. Bloom takes the dazed Stephen to a cabman's shelter under the Loop Line railway bridge for coffee. The prose is a deliberate parade of clichés, mixed metaphors, and the wrong word at every turn — Joyce rendering the way two tired men talk to each other after midnight. A red-bearded sailor named D.B. Murphy tells dubious South Sea tales of tattoos and knife fights. Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly. He invites him home for cocoa. Stephen accepts.
Appears: Bloom · Stephen · Cunningham (in conversation)
Episode 17
Two a.m. Bloom and Stephen reach 7 Eccles Street. Bloom has forgotten his key and climbs over the area railings to let himself in — closing the novel's opening parallel of the locked tower. They drink cocoa in the kitchen and urinate together in the garden under the stars. The chapter is in catechism — question and answer in cold scientific precision. Stephen leaves into the pre-dawn dark; the bells of St George's ring. Bloom climbs into bed beside Molly and falls asleep at her feet.
Appears: Bloom · Stephen · Molly
Episode 18
The small hours. Bloom is asleep at her feet. Molly is awake. The chapter is forty-five pages in eight long sentences with almost no punctuation, drifting through the afternoon with Boylan, her Gibraltar childhood with her father Major Tweedy, the dead infant Rudy, her marriage and her body, and finally the day on Howth Head years ago when Bloom proposed and she said yes. The book ends "yes I said yes I will Yes" — the most-quoted affirmation in modern literature.
Appears: Molly · Bloom (asleep) · Boylan (in memory)
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