James Joyce S Ulysses Term paper

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James Joyce's "Ulysses"

Many novelists directly reflect their life stories and personal circumstances in their works, so closely that the works may seem autobiographical. Although there are autobiographical parallels between James Joyce's life and that of his characters in Ulysses, the novel's scattered autobiographical details are more in the line of delightful puzzles to be ferreted out, rather than direct insights into Joyce's life. What is really important in Ulysses is not the ties to Joyce's personal experience; it is the way he uses his distinctively Irish experience to comment on the human condition in general. We think of Joyce as an Irish writer, and it may be surprising to learn that he left his native land as a relatively young man, feeling that its religion was constricting and its politics futile. He concluded, in short, that his country had given him nothing of value, and that he could only gain what he personally needed as a writer by ruthlessly divorcing himself from his Irish past. Ironically, however, every book Joyce wrote throughout his life would be set in the Dublin of his childhood, and Ulysses, in particular, is permeated with the sights, sounds, flavor and smells of Joyce's Irish boyhood. In the process of showing us his Ireland, Joyce taught us more about the Irish mind than any other writer before or since. In Ulysses, the reader follows the hero, Leopold Bloom, as he circumnavigates Dublin, eventually making his way out in the morning and home at the end of the day. We meet Leopold's wife Molly and his friend Stephen Dedalus, as well as "hundreds of other Dubliners as they walk the streets, meet and talk, then talk some more in restaurants and pubs. All this activity seems random, a record of urban happenstance. But nothing in Ulysses is truly random. Beneath the surface realism of the novel, its apparently artless transcription of life's flow, lurks a complicated plan" (Gray, 102). Joyce called his novel Ulysses as a conscious attempt to thematically evoke Homer's Odyssey, whose hero Ulysses (today generally called Odysseus) also made an epic journey of self-discovery. Yet it is not only the Greek classics to which Joyce has turned for inspiration, but the medieval Irish classics as well. One has only to read any cycle of medieval Celtic myth (such as the Irish Noinden Ulad, or the Welsh Mabinogen) to observe the same extraordinary structure at work there. The episodic formlessness of the Irish mythological epics heavily influenced the choice of form -- or, some would say, the lack thereof -- that was begun in Joyce's earlier works and brought to full fruition in Ulysses. The story line in either of these cycles flits from one anecdote to another in a manner that foreshadows Joyce's own stream-of-consciousness technique.

In addition, Joyce's words are arranged not in a rational manner but with a wild, intuitive Irishness, with as much emphasis on the magic of language as there is on its intellectual logic. We can see an example of this in Molly Bloom's ruminations in the final chapter, which consists of one single sentence extending for forty pages, with thought falling on thought like leaves piling up in the autumn. Consider just a fragment of that passage: "Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs. Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her mentholated spirit. . . ." (Joyce, 738). In these passages, scenes are scarcely in view long enough to be recognizable before another succeeds them. There is, of course, a logical train to one's stream-of-consciousness; this thought-fragment leads to that one, and that subsequent thought-fragment triggers something else. But again, Joyce is not concerned with logic but with experience; he is not interested in objectivity but immediacy. In other words, it was Joyce's goal to replicate as honestly as he could the way people actually think and feel and perceive. We are so used to the various conventions and devices that have come to characterize our literature over its long history that...

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Delaney, Frank. James Joyce's Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. (New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981).
Gray, Paul. "James Joyce: His 'Ulysses' Baffled Readers and Challenged Aspiring Fiction Writers; It Also Revolutionized 20th Century Fiction." (1998). Time, June 8, Vol. 151, No. 22, pp.102.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. (New York : Vintage Press Edition, 1961).
McCoy, Kathleen, and Judith Harlan. English Literature From 1785. (New York : HarperCollins, 1992).
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