Joyce - Ulysses

So - Joyce had apparently been planning the novel for eight years before he started writing it in 1914. With Leopold Bloom as his everyman (equiv. to Ulysses), and Bloom's wife Molly the equivalent to Penelope.

The important thing to me is that while all of these parallels with The Odyssey exist and were no doubt carefully placed in the book, the only obvious thing is the title - Joyce is showing, and not telling. It does, however, set up the whole novel as a play on what has gone before.

Stephen Dedalus is the focus of the first few chapters of the book, appropriate considering his similarities to Telemachus.


Hades chapter:

cf chapter 13 (sentimentalism in excess) - this shows reality (harsh, gritty, etc) in excess. Bloom's meditation on the decomposition of the human body are pretty unsentimental

Here's a great site with schemata of the whole book - basically the important correspondences between Ulysses and The Odyssey.

From that site:

Dodder, Grand and Royal canals, Liffey: The four rivers - Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Pyriphlegethon
Cunningham: Sisyphus
Father Coffey: Cerberus
Caretaker: Hades
Daniel O'Connell: Hercules
Dignam: Elpenor
Parnell: Agamemnon
Mentor: Ajax

The mode of writing: Narration & Dialogues -> theme of incubism

Salient points / themes: the cemetary, the sacred heart, the past, the unknown man, the unconscious, heart trouble, relics, heartbreak.

The caretaker as a lasting symbol...


Also keeping in mind Joyce's fanaticism about details, here's someone who may just have too much time on his hands, determining where in the carriage everyone was sitting, assuming that the four-seater carriage seats two looking forward, two looking back - which seems a safe assumption.


This was a great source:
[Bell, Robert H. "Preparatory to Anything Else:" Introduction to Joyce's "Hades." Journal of Modern Literature XXIV, 3/4 (Summer 2001), pp. 363-499, Indiana University Press, 2002]