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“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles,” he said, “that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” But thinking of Ulysses solely on these terms, as a riddle to be solved by professors, threatens to obscure what many readers find so enchanting about this book: the abundant joys to be had between its many hundreds of pages and with its places and personalities. Ulysses is, for its most affectionate readers, a living picture of the infinitely complex calculus of human action and desire.Ĭontaining this much, and that’s not to mention the meditations on Dante and Shakespeare and any number of other titanic figures, perhaps it goes without saying that Ulysses has a reputation for difficulty.Īccording to Joyce, Ulysses was to be a unique challenge for the reader. Ulysses is also a microcosm of the material forces that govern life: it explores everything from the colonial nation-state and the capitalist economy to matters of class, race, gender, sexuality, and belief, ultimately wondering what it might mean to be alive in the modern world. Its world, however, is populated by many other men, women, and children from all walks of life. Famously modeled on The Odyssey, its narrative is focused on two characters, Leopold Bloom, a middle-class everyman and Stephen Daedalus, a downwardly mobile intellectual.
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Ulysses describes a single day in the life of modern Dublin, on June 16, 1904. Today is Bloomsday, an annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses.