Episode 1
Telemachus
Eight a.m., the Martello tower at Sandycove. Buck Mulligan, a medical student, comes up the stairs in a yellow dressinggown carrying a bowl of shaving lather and intoning a parody of the Mass — "Introibo ad altare Dei." Stephen Dedalus, who has been sharing the tower with him and the English visitor Haines, is sleepless and silent. Mulligan needles him about his refusal to kneel at his dying mother's bedside. The three men eat breakfast. They walk down to the sea. Stephen, watching the green bay water and remembering the bowl of green bile beside his mother's deathbed, hands Mulligan the key to the tower and decides — silently — that he is not coming back.
Episode 2
Nestor
Mid-morning, Mr. Deasy's boys' school in Dalkey. Stephen teaches a listless history lesson on Pyrrhus and the battle of Asculum. He helps a slow boy with his sums, briefly tender, recognising in the boy's ugly persistence something of himself. He collects his wages — three pounds twelve — from the headmaster, an Ulster Protestant who lectures him on the importance of saving money ("I paid my way") and on the Jews, who, Deasy is sure, have been the ruin of every nation that admitted them. Deasy gives him a letter on foot-and-mouth disease to deliver to the newspapers. Stephen walks out across the playing field. "History," he has been thinking, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Episode 3
Proteus
Eleven a.m. Stephen walks alone along Sandymount Strand on his way into the city, thinking. The chapter is almost entirely interior monologue, opening with one of the novel's most-quoted sentences: "Ineluctable modality of the visible." Aristotle on perception, his year in Paris, the cousins he was supposed to visit and walked past, his dead mother, two midwives carrying a small bag down to the rocks, a dog running on the sand. He composes four lines of poetry on a corner torn from Deasy's letter. He picks his nose and looks around to see if anyone has watched him. The episode declares the technique the rest of the novel will use.
Episode 4
Calypso
Eight a.m. The novel begins again. Leopold Bloom in the kitchen at 7 Eccles Street. He likes the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He puts on his hat to fetch a kidney from Dlugacz the pork butcher's, leaves the kettle on the hob, and walks out into the morning. He buys the kidney and walks home. He brings Molly her breakfast in bed; she has had a letter from Boylan confirming the four-o'clock visit, and she asks Bloom what "metempsychosis" means. The kidney burns slightly. Their daughter Milly has sent a cheerful letter from Mullingar. Bloom reads it. He visits the outhouse at the end of the garden and reads the newspaper there.
Episode 5
Lotus Eaters
Ten a.m. Bloom is on his way across the city to Paddy Dignam's funeral. He stops at Westland Row post office to pick up a letter — addressed to "Henry Flower," a name he uses to correspond with a woman named Martha Clifford whom he has never met. He reads the letter on a side street. He sees Boylan in the distance and ducks into a doorway. He wanders into All Hallows church and watches a communion service with the curiosity of a non-believer. He orders Molly's skin lotion at Sweny's the chemist, picks up a bar of lemon soap, forgets to pay, and slips into the Turkish baths to soak.
Episode 6
Hades
Eleven a.m. The funeral procession assembles at Paddy Dignam's house. Bloom climbs into the third carriage with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham, and Mr. Power. They drive across Dublin to Glasnevin Cemetery. They pass Stephen on the way, walking the other direction; Simon, looking out, does not recognize his own son. They pass the spot where Bloom's father killed himself with poison eleven years before; Cunningham, knowing the story, deftly steers the conversation away from suicide when one of the others almost stumbles into it. They arrive at the cemetery. Dignam is buried. Bloom stands in the back of the chapel thinking about death, his dead father, and his dead infant son Rudy.
Episode 7
Aeolus
Noon at the Freeman's Journal offices on Prince's Street North, near the General Post Office. Bloom is there to renew the tea merchant Alexander Keyes's advertisement, with its particular crossed-keys design; Stephen is there to deliver Mr. Deasy's foot-and-mouth letter. They are in the same building for nearly an hour and do not meet. The episode is broken up by parodic newspaper headlines in capitals — mock-heroic, sometimes funny, drifting from broadsheet style toward modernist parody — and by oratory: J.J. O'Molloy recites Seymour Bushe's courtroom oration; Professor MacHugh declaims Taylor on Moses. Stephen tells the "Parable of the Plums" — two old women spitting plumstones from the top of Nelson's Pillar.
Episode 8
Lestrygonians
One p.m. Bloom is hungry. He walks down O'Connell Street toward the river, his monologue in full flow: food, advertising, religion, women, nuns, a YMCA leaflet ("Blood of the Lamb") thrust at him on the bridge that he eventually drops to the gulls. A man named Bantam Lyons mishears him and hurries off to bet on a horse called Throwaway. He runs into his old friend Josie Breen. He walks into the Burton restaurant, is repulsed by the chewing, walks out, goes instead to Davy Byrne's pub, eats a Gorgonzola sandwich with a glass of burgundy, dodges Nosey Flynn's questions about Molly, helps a blind piano-tuner across the street on the way out.
Episode 9
Scylla and Charybdis
Two p.m., the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. Stephen is holding forth to a small audience of literary men — the librarian Lyster, the poet AE (George Russell), the journalist John Eglinton — on his theory of Shakespeare. The argument: Hamlet is autobiography. Shakespeare is the ghost of King Hamlet; Hamnet, his dead son, is the prince; Anne Hathaway, the unfaithful wife, is Gertrude. Stephen is brilliantly erudite, dazzlingly sarcastic. Buck Mulligan arrives and undercuts him with bawdy mockery. Asked at the end whether he believes it, Stephen smiles and says no. Bloom passes briefly through the library to check his Keyes ad. They do not yet meet.
Episode 10
Wandering Rocks
Three p.m. The episode is structured as nineteen short vignettes, each following a different Dubliner through the same hour across the same streets. Father Conmee walks serenely through the suburbs on an errand for the Dignam children. Corny Kelleher chats outside his coffin shop. Molly's hand at a window throws a coin to a one-legged sailor. Boylan buys fruit and port for Molly. Stephen meets his sister Dilly outside a bookstall — she is starving; he gives her coins and walks away ashamed. Bloom hunts a risqué novel at a quayside stall and settles on Sweets of Sin. The viceregal cavalcade closes the episode, threading through and being seen by everyone.
Episode 11
Sirens
Four p.m., the Ormond Hotel bar. The chapter opens with two pages of broken phrases — fragments of the lines and images that will follow — like the tuning-up of a fugue. Bloom enters with Stephen's uncle Richie Goulding to dine in the side room. Simon Dedalus, Ben Dollard, and the priest Father Cowley are at the piano, singing. Boylan comes in for a quick drink, jingling his watch, and walks out again on his way to 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's letter at his table. He leaves at the end with a quiet flatulence on Robert Emmet's last words.
Episode 12
Cyclops
Five p.m., Barney Kiernan's pub off Little Britain Street. Bloom has come to meet Martin Cunningham about Paddy Dignam's insurance. The narrator is, for the first time in the novel, an unnamed Dublin debt-collector with a sharp, sarcastic, vernacular tone — his nickname for Bloom is "the prudent member." The Citizen, an enormous Fenian with a mangy dog named Garryowen, holds court at the bar — denouncing England, foreigners, and the Jews. The chapter is interrupted by escalating mock-heroic parodies (legal bombast, journalese, scientific reportage). The Citizen turns on Bloom for being a Jew. Bloom answers him: "Christ was a jew like me." The Citizen, enraged, hurls a biscuit tin after Bloom's departing cab.
Episode 13
Nausicaa
Eight p.m., Sandymount Strand at dusk — the same beach Stephen walked along nine hours earlier. Three young women on the rocks watch the fireworks for the Mirus charity bazaar over Howth Head — Gerty MacDowell, Edy Boardman, Cissy Caffrey. The first half of the chapter is in the prose of late-Victorian women's magazines — sentimental, romantic, full of cliché. Gerty becomes aware that the dark-suited gentleman at the other end of the strand is watching her, and as the fireworks burst overhead she leans back on the rock for him. When she stands to leave, we learn she has a limp. The second half cuts to Bloom's tired voice.
Episode 14
Oxen of the Sun
Ten p.m., the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. Bloom comes to ask after Molly's friend Mina Purefoy, in labour for three days. He finds Stephen drinking with the medical students in the residents' common room — Mulligan, Haines, Lynch, Costello, Dixon, Lenehan — and stays, the only sober man in the room, partly out of fatherly concern. The chapter runs the entire history of English prose styles in chronological pastiche: Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, medieval Latin-and-Saxon, Mandeville, Malory, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Gibbon, Lamb, De Quincey, Dickens, Carlyle, Newman, Pater, and finally a contemporary American revivalist tract. The baby is born; the students leave for Burke's pub; Bloom follows Stephen out into the night.
Episode 15
Circe
Midnight, 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, italicized stage directions, and impossible scene changes between literal reality and hallucination. Stephen and Lynch have stumbled into Bella Cohen's house; Bloom, following at a distance, comes in to watch over Stephen. The hallucinations begin. Bloom is put on trial; Bella Cohen transforms into the masculine "Bello" and dominates him; his dead son Rudy briefly appears, eleven years old as he would have been. Stephen, hallucinating his dead mother's ghost, cries "Non serviam!" and smashes a chandelier. An English soldier knocks him down. Bloom picks him up.
Episode 16
Eumaeus
One a.m. Bloom and Stephen walk slowly to a cabman's shelter under the Loop Line railway bridge. The chapter is the slowest and most exhausted in the novel. The prose is full of clichés, mixed metaphors, mistaken syntax, the wrong word at every turn — Joyce is rendering the way two tired men talk to each other after midnight. They sit at the counter. A red-bearded sailor named D.B. Murphy tells dubious tales of the South Seas. Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly, awkwardly. He talks gently to him about prudence, about staying out of bad company, about the dangers of drink. Stephen, half-asleep, barely engages. Bloom invites him home for cocoa. Stephen accepts.
Episode 17
Ithaca
Two a.m. Bloom and Stephen walk through empty streets to 7 Eccles Street. Bloom has forgotten his key and climbs over the area railings to let himself in — closing the novel's opening parallel, in which Mulligan kept the tower key. He lets Stephen in, makes them cocoa, and the two men talk. The chapter is written entirely in catechism — question and answer, in cold scientific precision. 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. His thoughts on Molly's adultery: equanimity. Stephen declines Bloom's invitation to stay and leaves. Bloom climbs into bed beside Molly.
Episode 18
Penelope
The small hours. Bloom is asleep at her feet. Molly is awake. The chapter is forty-five pages in eight long sentences, almost without punctuation, almost without paragraph breaks, almost without concession to the conventional reader. She drifts through the afternoon with Boylan, her childhood in Gibraltar with her father Major Tweedy, her dead infant son Rudy, her marriage, her old lovers, her body, her singing, her sense of God, her tenderness for Bloom that she rarely shows him. She remembers, finally, the day on Howth Head years ago when Bloom proposed and she said yes. The book's last words — "yes I said yes I will Yes" — are the most-quoted affirmation in modern literature.