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Ulysses, by James Joyce, is a challenge to understand. It is a masterpiece, a novel that stretches the form and content of the genre of which it is a part. At the same time that Ulysses uses Homer's Odyssey as a major literary referent, the work heralds the end of the nineteenth- century novel as it was commonly understood. It takes readers into the inner realms of human consciousness using the interior monologue style that later is known as stream of consciousness. Apart of this psychological characteristic, it gives a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people living in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904. It was first published in its entirety in France in 1922. In 1933 the novel was the subject of a detestable trial, but was found by a U.S. district court in New York to be a work of art.
Ulysses has as its hero a most ordinary man, Leopold Bloom. Unlike the muscular, militaristic Homeric hero whose name serves as the novel's title, Bloom is gentle, self- effacing, reserved, and peripheralized. Arguably more associated with home than the outer world, even though on this day he spends most of his time out about town, the kindly, other- centered Bloom is first depicted making breakfast for his wife and feeding the cat. He is a caring man, deeply attached to his wife and daughter and continuing to mourn the neonatal death of his son, Rudy. Whereas Ulysses welcomes adventures in strange and threatening places and has a crew of sailors he orders about, Bloom lives an ordinary man's life and is a loner, an outsider, a Jew, a character who is more focused in the others than in himself.
Keywords: Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, James Joyce, Modern hero character.
INTRODUCTION
'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century'
Anthony Burges, Observer.
For Joyce, literature is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernist classic, its ceaseless verbal inventiveness and astonishingly wide-ranging allusions confirm its standing as an imperishable monument to the human condition. Declan Kiberd says in his introduction that Ulysses is ''an endlessly open book of the utopian...