Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses, one of the best books of the 20th century, has a significant impact on contemporary literature. The book follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they wander through Dublin’s streets on one day, June 16, 1904, in a sequence of events. The book is one of the greatest, longest tours de force of the stream-of-consciousness narrative, with each chapter having its own distinctive, highly unique literary style. Any tour of English literature must include it.
Ulysses by James Joyce
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Ulysses begins with our old friend Stephen Dedalus traversing Dublin, working as a teacher, and continuing to strive to be an artist in a city that constantly makes him feel lonely, alone, and without a home, about a year after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concludes. While the first three chapters of the book are devoted to Stephen, the remaining chapters centre on a different character named Leopold Bloom, a famous Dublin Jew who, after eating mutton kidney for breakfast, leaves the house to go about his daily activities while also being aware that his wife Molly is preparing for an affair later that afternoon.
As we follow him through his day’s activities, he is troubled by this knowledge, his loneliness among his fellow Dubliners, the death of his little son ten years ago, as well as a number of other issues. His route often crosses Stephen’s, and eventually, the two misfits connect and engage in meaningful dialogue. Ulysses, which takes place in a little less than 24 hours, is an epic of every day, a day that includes every imaginable high and low.
The novel Ulysses is incredibly humorous, clever, captivating, and lovely. It would be difficult to find a work with more beautiful or varied prose than this one, and Joyce is a fantastic writer. Some sentences simply halt you in your tracks with their beauty. Because of his extraordinary writing abilities, Joyce can create the cleverest puns and the funniest satires. There is nothing Joyce can’t laugh at, from the bar to the cemetery, from political debates to prostitution, from the romance novel to the epic catalogue.
