Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung von Ulysses
Für wen es gedacht ist
For readers who love language play, wandering minds and the life of a city, and anyone curious about how an ordinary Dublin day echoes Homer's Odyssey.
Worum es in diesem Buch geht
Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, an Irish writer who lived most of his adult life abroad. He wrote it between 1914 and 1921 in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It first appeared as a book in Paris in 1922, published by Sylvia Beach at her shop, Shakespeare and Company. Parts of it had already run in a magazine, and courts in the United States had banned them for obscenity.
The book follows one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904. Three people stand at its center. Leopold Bloom is an advertising canvasser, a kind, curious and slightly outcast man. Stephen Dedalus is a young teacher and would-be poet, grieving and proud. Molly Bloom is Leopold's wife, a singer. Joyce took the structure from Homer's Odyssey. Each of the eighteen episodes echoes a scene from that ancient poem, yet the hero is a Dublin man with a lunch to find and a marriage to worry about.
What do you get from it? You get a city, with its pubs, streets, newspapers, funerals and gossip, set down in great detail. You also get a close look at how minds work, with their jokes, fears and wandering memories. Joyce changes his style from episode to episode, so the book keeps surprising you. Let us begin where the day begins, in a tower by the sea.
In dieser Zusammenfassung
- 1A tower by the sea opens the dayFree
- 2Leopold Bloom makes breakfast and goes out
- 3A funeral and a newspaper office
- 4Lunch, a library and a theory of Hamlet
- 5Dublin crosses itself in many directions
- 6Anger in a pub and longing on a beach
- 7A birth in words and a night in Nighttown
- 8The epic is hidden in an ordinary day
- 9A book that changes its voice as it goes
Punkt 1 von 9
A tower by the sea opens the day
The book opens on the morning of 16 June 1904 at the Martello tower in Sandycove, a round stone fort on the coast south of Dublin. Buck Mulligan, a loud medical student with a talent for mockery, shaves on the roof. Stephen Dedalus lives there with him, and with an Englishman named Haines who studies Irish folklore. Stephen is quiet and bitter. He does not like how Mulligan treats him, and he does not like that he pays the rent for the tower.
Stephen carries a heavy grief. His mother died not long before, and she asked him to kneel and pray at her bedside. He refused. Mulligan teases him about it, and the wound stays open all day. Readers who know Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will recognize Stephen. He is the same young man, now back in Dublin after a failed attempt to live as an artist in Paris.
The second episode moves to a boys' school in Dalkey, where Stephen teaches history. He is paid by the headmaster, Mr Deasy, an old Protestant with firm opinions about money, Jews and the Irish. Deasy lectures Stephen on saving and asks him to help get a letter about cattle disease into the newspapers. Stephen listens, disagrees silently, and lets the old man talk. It is here that he says history is a nightmare from which he is trying to wake.
The third episode follows Stephen alone along Sandymount strand, the long beach south of the city. There is almost no action. Instead we sit inside his mind as he walks, and it is crowded with philosophy, languages, memories of Paris and a dream of a strange man. He tries to prove that the world exists by shutting his eyes and listening to his own footsteps.
These three episodes are often called the Telemachiad, after Telemachus, the son in the Odyssey who looks for his missing father. Stephen is a son without a satisfying father, and he is looking, though he would never say so. Keep that idea in mind. The book is about to introduce the man who may fill the gap.
Do not worry if you miss references. The feeling of a proud, hurt mind is enough to carry you forward.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Questions about Ulysses
What is Ulysses about?
Ulysses follows one day, 16 June 1904, in Dublin. It tracks Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom through streets, pubs, a funeral and a library, while echoing the structure of Homer's Odyssey.
Why is it called Ulysses?
Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey. Joyce matched each of his eighteen episodes to a part of that ancient poem, making a Dublin man a modern wanderer.
Is Ulysses hard to read?
No. The book follows one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, through kind, curious Leopold Bloom and proud young Stephen. It moves in short, lively episodes, from breakfast to a funeral to lunch, so each scene is easy to step into.
What is Bloomsday?
Bloomsday is the yearly celebration of the novel on 16 June, the date on which it is set. Fans in Dublin and elsewhere read from the book, dress in period clothes and walk Bloom's route.
Why was Ulysses banned?
Parts of the book deal frankly with the body and sexual thoughts, so courts in the United States and authorities in Britain treated it as obscene. A New York judge ruled against the ban in 1933.