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How to read Ulysses: the bare minimum you actually need

May 26, 20265 min readreading-guides

Ulysses is the most famous unread classic in the English language -- a novel that more people own than finish, more people reference than understand. You do not need to understand all of it. No one does. What you need is enough of a framework to enter it and let it work on you.

James Joyce published Ulysses in 1922. It follows three characters -- Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and the young writer Stephen Dedalus -- through a single day in Dublin on 16 June 1904. Each chapter corresponds loosely to an episode in Homer's Odyssey. Each chapter also has its own narrative style, which is why the novel can feel like it changes form entirely from chapter to chapter.

What do you actually need to know before you start?#

Three things will do more work than anything else:

First: know who Odysseus is. He is the wandering king who spent ten years trying to get home to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus after the Trojan War. Leopold Bloom is Odysseus. Molly is Penelope. Stephen is Telemachus. The father-son connection between Bloom and Stephen is the emotional spine of the novel.

Second: know that 16 June is Joyce's own significant date. It was the day he first walked out with his future wife Nora Barnacle in 1904. Bloomsday, as it is now celebrated internationally each year, commemorates this.

Third: know that the novel gets easier, not harder, as it progresses. The first two chapters, following Stephen, are dense with theological and aesthetic argument. Chapters four and five, introducing Bloom, are warmer, funnier, and more accessible. If you find the opening difficult, push to Chapter Four before deciding whether to continue.

Which chapters are the hardest and how do you handle them?#

The hardest chapters are:

Oxen of the Sun (Chapter 14): a history of English prose style from Anglo-Saxon to the 19th century, each section written in a different period's style. On a first read, do not try to identify the styles. Just let the language move past you and register the general sense.

Circe (Chapter 15): a lengthy dream/hallucination sequence written as a play. It is surreal, psychologically dense, and very long. Treat it as expressionist theatre: you are not expected to follow every reference. The emotional core -- Bloom's confrontation with his fears and desires, Stephen's confrontation with his mother -- is legible even when the surrounding material is not.

Penelope (Chapter 18): Molly Bloom's unpunctuated interior monologue. It looks terrifying. It is actually the most accessible chapter in the novel once you accept that there is no punctuation and adjust your reading accordingly. Read it slowly and aloud if you can. It is one of the most beautiful things Joyce wrote.

What is stream of consciousness and why does Joyce use it?#

Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that represents the flow of a character's thoughts directly, without the organising conventions of reported speech or sequential narrative. Joyce uses it because he wanted to capture what it is actually like to be inside a mind moving through a day: associative, digressive, full of sensory detail, emotional memory, and interrupted thought.

The technique requires a different kind of reading attention. You are not following a plot so much as inhabiting a consciousness. When Bloom's mind jumps from a funeral to a kidney to his wife to an advertisement he saw last week, that is not bad writing. That is precisely what Joyce is doing: showing you the texture of a mind alive in the world.

For the biography of the writer and the context in which the novel was written, who Virginia Woolf was and what stream of consciousness means covers the technique from Woolf's angle, which is useful preparation for approaching Joyce.

Do you need a guide?#

A guide helps significantly for a first read. Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated (University of California Press) is the standard scholarly reference, but it is too detailed for a first read -- using it chapter by chapter slows reading to an annotating exercise rather than an experience.

For a first read, Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses (Vintage) provides a clear chapter-by-chapter overview of the Homeric correspondences and general structure without overwhelming the reading experience. Reading the relevant pages of Gilbert before each chapter rather than after gives you a frame without over-determining the experience.

What is Ulysses actually about, underneath everything?#

It is about an ordinary man having an ordinary day, and the fact that this is enough. Bloom is not heroic in any conventional sense. He is kind, curious, a little lonely, capable of generosity and small-mindedness in equal measure. He buys a kidney for breakfast. He reads the paper in the bathroom. He thinks about his dead son, his absent wife, his own mortality.

Joyce's argument -- which is also Homer's argument, which is why the Odyssey is the model -- is that the wandering of an ordinary person through an ordinary day has the same mythic weight as the wandering of a king through a ten-year war. Bloom's Dublin is Odysseus's Mediterranean. The journey home matters at whatever scale it occurs.

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