HE is a “very modernist” writer. “Ulysses” explain the reason. It is the story of a single day,
June 16th 1904, in the life of three Dubiners, it is divided into three corresponding parts. The first
part is devoted to Stephen Dedalus, a young man with intellectual ambition, a martyr to art. The
second part is dominated by the figure of Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the title. He is a middle-
age married man, who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean. The
third part is dominated by his wife, Molly Bloom, who corresponds to Ulysses wife Penelope.
Joyce technique helps the reader to enter the character’s mind and understand his personality. If
we read any extract from Ulysses we notice that the reader is not able to classify the kind of
narration. “What do they ask us to marry them for if were so bad as all that comes to yes
because they cant get on without us white Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasn’t it I
wonder why they call it that if I asked him had say its from Greek”. Who is telling the story? A
first – person narrator? A third person - narrator? Both? The narrator seems to have disappeared
to let the reader see how the character’s mind works.
