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James joyce (1882–1941)

Life. James Joyce was born in Dublin and was educated at Jesuit schools and University College, Dublin, where he studied philosophy and languages. He was well-read from an early age and took an ardent interest in modern languages. Under Jesuit tutelage he considered the vocation of a priest. Later he abandoned this idea and the Roman Catholic Church itself for the career of a writer. He decided he had learned enough to reject his religion and all his obligations to his family, homeland and the British , who ruled there. In 1902 he went to Paris , where he lived for a year in poverty, wrote poetry and discovered E. Dujardin’s novel of 1888, Les Lauriers sont Coupés, from which he later borrowed the interior monologue, or the “stream of consciousness” narrative technique. He returned to Dublin , but left soon after with Nora Barnacle – who bore him a son and a daughter . During the First World War he lived in Zurich, but settled in Paris in 1920, which was to become his permanent home. He remained impoverished , suffering from severe eye trouble, which led to near blindness in later life.

Joyce's life is that of constant wanderings and a spiritual Odyssey.

Creative Works. He is the writer of four masterpieces {"Dubliners" (1914), “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916), "Ulysses”( 1922), "Finnegan’s Wake”( 1939 )}.

“Dubliners” is a collection of 15 stories . The stories treat slices of Dublin life. The book was greeted with enthusiasm and admiration by Ezra Pound ( 1885 – 1972 ), an American expatriate, one of the founders of European modernism. Ezra Pound believed that a new century demanded new art, new poetry, new fiction, new music – everything new. He supported and promoted Joyce and his experimental writings. Those who seek an insight into Joyce the artist and his work will find here a complete spectrum of his Irish roots. With meticulous attention to detail he created an intimately observed portrait of Dublin and its inhabitants.

Joyce is more or less traditional in “Dubliners”. He does not yet utterly destroy literary forms. He does not yet decanonize the structural design, the character. The plots are conventional. The language is not yet weblike. He does not yet audaciously experiment with combinatorial potencies of words. The narration is not yet that of an obscure stream of consciousness with a myriad impressions, associations and quotations. There are no enigmas and puzzles, intricate symbolic and linguistic labyrinths. There are no multilingual puns with allusions to every aspect of history and literature.

The dominant mood is realistic. We see an accurate visual perception of an objective reality, with actual people in a real place. Still there is something symbolic here. Two parallel worlds of the real and the symbolic are coexistent and related in his text, which justifies the double reading of “Dubliners”. It is more than a miscellaneous collection of stories. It is rather a fragmentary novel about the moral history of Ireland and Dublin, about humane comedy. It is the same panorama of futility, as we shall see in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”(1922) and his own “Ulysses”( 1922 ). Dublin stifles, cripples, paralyses the life of its inhabitants. It is Joyce’s Waste Land.

In “Dubliners” we find the problems, which are to be developed in “A Portrait…” and “Ulysses”. Such is, for instance, the interrelation between matter and spirit. The protagonist of the story “A Painful Case” , like Stephen Dedalus from “A Portrait…” and ‘Ulysses”, is incapable to reconcile matter and spirit.

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” ( 1916 ) is largely autobiographical . The complex character of Stephen Dedalus, and the charting of his early hopes and ambitions, is closely linked with the author himself. The stages in the development of Stephen’s personality repeat the life of Joyce himself: childhood in a family that is a microcosm of the Irish society of that time, education in a Jesuit college, religious doubts, rebellion and loss of faith, self-knowledge as an artist, a poet, rejection of Irish life, the decision to leave the native land.

The book provides a remarkably objective and linguistically complex account of Stephen Dedalus from his birth to his decision to leave Dublin in pursuit of his art. Shaped by his experiences of early life at home where his father exerts a powerful influence, through bullying at school to an adolescent crisis of faith and student days, Stephen gradually emerges with a sense of his own destiny as poet, patriot and unbeliever. He is determined to create his own individual voice.

The novel is exuberantly inventive and experimental. It shows the evolution – biological, spiritual and intellectual - of Stephen Dedalus, the growing complexity of his perception of the world. This growing complexity of an artist is being reflected in the growing maturity of fiction. The book is becoming more and more complicated and inventive in accord with the growing maturity of the protagonist.

It is a Bildungsroman developing the European tradition ( Ch. Dickens’s” David Copperfield”, W.S.Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage”). Joyce challenges received ideas. Experimenting with genres, and composition he creates a brainy philosophical parable. Joyce violates the canon of the classical realistic novel based on the model “ world – man -consciousness”, instead he uses the “man – consciousness – world” model. At the centre of his attention is man’s psychological make-up.

The book closes with Stephen's pas­sionate desire to see "the white arms of the roads", "the black arms of tall ships", to hear "their promise of close embraces" and "their tale of distant nations". "Welcome, o life", he exclaims. The "I" of the end of the novel is not merely that of a concrete youth desiring to ex­perience real life, but the "I" of millions before him, who have been wandering in search of personal truth: "I go to encounter for the mil­lionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race". Stephen asks the initial bearer of his name, the great ancient artificer Dedalus, to help him realize his dreams: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead".

The book is written in a mood of enraptured fervour. Joyce richly resorts to Christian symbolism and theological terminology. He seems to be supersaturated in Roman Catholic teaching. H.G.Wells called "A Portrait..." by far the most living and convincing picture that exists of an Irish Catholic upbringing”.

This is an artist novel. Traditionally artists fall into 3 categories: The Ivory Tower, The Sacred Fount and The Divided Self . Stephen Dedalus,like his creator James Joyce, is an ivory tower artist, self-centered, egotistic, confessional and obsessively introspective, solitary in the midst of people. He flies towards the lofty summits of the Ideal, tormented by the desire of the unattainable.

Stephen dreams of leaving Ireland and creating his own version of the Ivory Tower. He feels himself Dedalus, a talented ancient artificer, the creator of the famous intricate labyrinth, and Icarus flying towards the sun. Joyce treats his Stephen somewhat ironically, which means that he was not devoid of self-abuse and self-irony.

The dominant theme of the novel is quest for self.

Stephen Dedalus is carried forward to “Ulysses”. His experience increases and the prose grows more resourceful. It is Joyce’s artistic discovery to create prose , which is capable of maturing, of getting sophisticated , of corresponding to a hero’s growing maturity.

There are promises of the Joyce of “Ulysses” in “A Portrait…”: a comparatively shapeless plot, drifting time and space, the stream of consciousness technique. Joyce prepares the way for the internal monologue, which is capable of conveying the dialectics of the soul , with the laws of outward logic being destroyed by the mighty forces of the unconscious.

In “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” we do not yet see that mental flotsam and jetsam, that mental sewage which drifts endlessly without cohesion in “Ulysses”. We do not yet see unpunctuated interior monologues, the language, unintelligible to the average mind, echoic language, distorted sound-echoes and subjectless syntactic structures, prolonged linguistic games, endless punning and word-making.

The literary fate of “Ulysses”. Even before “Ulysses” was published, critics were comparing Joyce’s breakthroughs to those of Einstein and Freud. "Ulysses” was published in Paris in 1922 and created, what the gutter press loves, a scandal. For more than 10 years “Ulysses” , banned for obscenity, could not legally be brought into any English – speaking country . In 1933 , "Ulysses” was exonerated from the charge of obscenity in the US and became available everywhere. Since its first publication thousands of scholarly works and articles have been written about "Ulysses" in all the civilized languages of the world . "Joyceana" is truly limitless. "Ulysses" has enormous influence on the literature and culture of all countries, it has become a legendary clas­sic. It continues to inspire musical settings, recordings, radio and TV programs, stage and film versions.

The reaction of the literary world to "Ulysses”. The publication of Joyce’s greatest book brought him notoriety and fame, disparagement and adulation. His detractors fiercely attacked Joyce for obscurity, poignant obsession with sex, destruction of artistic form and art itself, sheer disorder of syntax . They found the novel as featureless as a telephone directory, an epic of decay and the author the prophet of chaos.

Arnold Bennett found the book difficult and dull, the things repro­duced trivial and perfectly futile: "Joyce has no geographical sense, little sense of environment, not much poetical sense, no sense of per­spective. His vision of the world and its inhabitants is mean, hostile and uncharitable. Though the book is not pornographic, it is more inde­cent, obscene and licentious than the majority of pornographic books. He (Joyce) forbids himself no word". Still A.Bennett found Joyce an as­tonishing phenomenon in literature, dazzlingly original, with marvellous ingenuity, wit and prodigious humour.

Richard Aldington , recognizing Joyce's intellectuality, his amazing obser­vation, memory and intuition, other marvelous gifts , qualifies "Ulysses" as “a bitter, sordid, ferociously satirical book, a tremendous libel on humanity, a dangerous reading for anyone whose style is unformed”.

Joyce's admirers hold that it is now as impossible to imagine the 20th century literature without "Ulysses" as to imagine the 20th cen­tury physics without Relativity.

Thomas Stearns Eliot found Joyce "the greatest master of English since Milton", the book "the most important expression which the present age has found". "Ulysses" gave him "all the surprise, delight and terror..."

William Faulkner said: "The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith".

Ernest Hemingway found Joyce the greatest writer in the world and his "Ulysses" "a most god-damn wonderful book". Stephen Dedalus's words "1 fear those big words...which make us so unhappy” ( episode "Nestor") produced an unforgettable impression upon Hemingway and became his ar­tistic credo. Deliberately anti-intellectual, Hemingway worshipped the profoundly intellectual Joyce. C.Baker chose as an epigraph to his book "Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story" Joyce's words from his "A Portrait.." "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life..."

George Orwell wrote to a friend : “Ulysses…I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like this...I feel like a eunuch".

Joyce’s perception of life. Joyce found life a senseless horror having no objective and coherent aim, a chaos of existence, a complete break­down of all but the most superficial communication between human beings. He believed that society has gone far in decomposition. Everything gra­dually disintegrates, dissolves into crazy and hideous nothingness or a something that is worse still - into triviality. Life is a labyrinth, an insolvable riddle. To express his dismay and horror at the sight of it , Joyce hurled "Ulysses" as a defiance at the contemporary world.

The plot of "Ulysses". Externally "Ulysses", more than seven hundred. pages long, is plotless. The plot is minimal, simply recording exhaustively the events of an ordinary, grey weekday - June 16, 1904 - in the lives of two Dubliners, Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a poet and teacher. They ramble in the streets of Dublin. The cent­ral character of the book is Leopold Bloom. "Ulysses" is a description of "the dailiest day possible" of his life, a Bloomsday. Bloom is trying to block off from his thoughts what ought to be the novel's principal topic-the Boylan-Molly liaison (a love-affair). The book is not merely about Bloom's story, the cuckold-to be drifting round the city. It is also a story about Stephen Dedalus, seeking a father, drinking, ruminating. As far back as 1932, Karl Young wrote: "Ulysses”... pours along for seven hund­red and thirty five pages...one single and senseless every day of Every­man...a day, on which, in all truth, nothing happens... It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness".

The novel is uneventful. Event becomes word. Words replace visible acts. Joyce is not interested in events as such. He is coldly indifferent to harsh political realities. In "Ulysses" Joyce substitutes inner action, a series of images, drawn from the memory, a disorderly throng of free associations, or the fantasy world , for the outer action of Dubliners.

The conceptual basis of "Ulysses". Some light is to be shed on the con­cepts which influenced Joyce philosophically and artistically. Joyce was an erudite philologist . He knew the most significant philosophical and linguistic theories from antiquity to his day. In "Ulysses" Joyce materialized relativity, existentialism, freudism, reincarnation. He was highly affected by Jordano Bruno's idea of dichotomies, according to which every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realize itself. We find a whole pa­radigm of dichotomies, upon which "Ulysses" is constructed: the ideal and the real, dream and action, spirit and matter, deed and vision, reunion and separation, departure and return, life and death, The God and The Satan, etc. These oppositions constitute a unity: the movement of a day from sunrise to sunset, a biblical history from genesis to apocalypse. These polarities (saint and heretic, Christ as the bringer of light and Lucifer as the bringer of darkness, good and evil, etc.) meet. "'Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life... In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet". The borderline between the genius-as-saint and the genius-as-heretic is blurred. Joyce was affected by Nietzsche’s ideas of The Eternal Return, that is reincarnation. The universe is thus shown as a circular movement, which has repeated itself an infinite number of times. History repeats and renews itself. Everything eternally returns. Ulysses returns as a private and obscure man, Leopold Bloom. Telemachus, Icarus and Hamlet return as Stephen Dedalus. Joyce was enchanted by Nietzsche's idea of life being a labyrinth. Stephen's thoughts, ever shifting from subject to subject, are a labyrinth, in which one can orient himself by means of some clues and guides.

Joyce was committed to the Neorenaissance idea of absolute preference of man over society. Hence , it is not the events that interested him but man’s psyche, the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything.

The dominant themes. There are several dominant themes in "Ulysses”. The theme of reincarnation is implicitly present in the reproduction of Ulysses’s adventures in those of Bloom’s , Hamlet’s meditations in those of Stephen Dedalus’s. Joyce explores the theme of fatherhood as creativity, human and divine. The theme of motherhood is also distinguishable. Stephen rebels against his own mother, his mother the Church, his mother country. The text under analysis is cohesive. It is due to the repetition of the theme of death, which is explicit and implicit here.

The writer and reality. "Ulysses" was conceived in the suffocating atmosphere of the war crisis. Joyce came to realize that the stability of the traditional way of life in the age of social crisis and world-wide devas­tation was overthrown. Joyce re-examined the relationship between writer and reality. Joyce stood aloof from the political events. He escaped into the realm of introspection. He wanted to live apolitically, weaving the web of his interior monologues. He believed that an artist is a rebel, like Lucifer.

Dream and reality in “Ulysses”. Like T.S. Eliot, Joyce considered contem­porary history to be an immense panorama of futility and anarchy. Being indifferent to social and political matters, Joyce withdrew into himself. He depicted reality from the individual, subjective point of view. The solid world, peopled with ordinary objects, disappears. It is a new world of imaginings, thoughts, associations and impressions. Philosophizing becomes an end in itself. In "A Portrait..” Joyce only begins to mix imagination and reality. In "Ulysses" this intermingling is significant. A self-exiled artist, Joyce followed the imperatives of his vocation. He retreated be­hind the psychological defenses of the solitary mind. His alter ego Stephen Dedalus builds a fantasy world out of past memories and momentary sensations. Fantasy, dreams, visions are confused with reality in his mind. Z. Freud saw dreams as fulfillment of repressed desires. Much is re­miniscent of Freud’s theory of dreams, his effect of dream displacement, of dream distortion.

Joyce's new techniques and methods of literary representation. In the 1920 - s disorder, disillusionment and loss of direction affected many writers. Joyce's literary endeavours echo Lawrence's "liberation of the instincts", Huxley's extreme intellectualism, Mansfield's delicate impressionist sketches based on mundane happenings, Woolf's and Eliot's rejection of conventional forms. Joyce was the most notable of the writers of the beginning of the century to have violated the moral and artistic conventions and codes observed by the novelist. He rejected the aesthetic principles of the classical novel. Treating life as a horror and chaos, where everything decomposes, deteriorates and dissolves into nothingness, Joyce had to elaborate entirely new narrative and structural techniques, new artistry and new syntax. "Ulysses" is a decanonization of traditional canons of all kinds, literary, stylistic and linguistic ones. Joyce refused from the plot, exposition, climax, harmony of the narrative techniques, the harmony of styles. "There is no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style" (V.Woolf ), there is no familiar periodization of history, objective time. Joyce is blending styles, voices, narrative techniques, temporal and spatial spheres. It is as if we saw a double, or even a multiple cinema film with a clear foreground and a background, blurred and out of focus. He demonstrates a stereoscopic and stereophonic vision and hearing.

Homeric parallels. The book is built on parallels between antiquity ( Homer's " The Odyssey") and modernity (1904 ). Joyce stated himself that this is a book based on the wanderings of Ulysses, but he was writing about recent times, and his hero’s wanderings took no more than eighteen hours. The importance of the Homeric parallel is primarily structural: it provided Joyce with a convenient framework. Each episode of "Ulysses" has its parallel in "The Odyssey". All the main and most of the minor characters of "Ulysses" cor­respond to the major and minor characters of "The Odyssey". The foregro­und is taken up by an ordinary day in the life of Bloom and Stephen, while in the background lies the relation of Bloom to Odysseus, Dedalus to Telemachus, the modern to the ancient world, i.e. the general questions of human destiny.

"The Odyssey’s" twentv four books are named by the Greek alphabet's 24 letters, and the 18 episodes of "Ulysses" agree in number with the 18 letters of the Irish alphabet. But the Homeric parallel is a dangerous guide to what is actually happening in the book. True, each chapter revives an incident from Homer's epic and each character has a Homeric prototype, but these incidents and characters are mocking mirrors. Stephen and Bloom are son in search of father and father in search of son, like Telemachus and Odysseus. Bloom is wandering along Dublin streets - Odysseus is wandering across the seas and oceans. Bloom returns to his flat - Odysseus returns to Ithaka. Like Homer, Joyce keeps his protagonists moving. Unlike Odysseus, who is striving to get home after his severe pilgrimage , Bloom is finding many reasons not to go home just yet. Telemachus in "The Odyssey" sets out from Ithaka in quest of his father Odysseus. Stephen fears he will never escape the destiny of his drinking father. He is dreaming of inspiration to be received from his spiritual father, the old artificer of antiquity Dedalus. The shifts from episode to episode are kaleidoscopic and we acquire the illusion of having traveled all over Dublin city. We are captivated by this incessant movement, "a slow dance of Fate" ( V.Nabokov ).

Unlike the heroes of "The Odyssey", who perform great deeds, the characters of "Ulysses" do nothing. They dream, reflect, reminiscence. The symbolic cross-reference between "The Odyssey" and "Ulysses" is a constant source of comedy. The hero Odysseus and the spineless Bloom. The devoted family man Telemachus and the Stephen, who breaks away from his home. The faithful Penelope and the multiple adulteress Molly. "Ulysses" is a travesty of Homer's heroic poem. Bloom travesties Odysseus. Stephen travesties Telemachus. Molly travesties Penelope.

T.S.Eliot thought highly of Joyce as the creator of the mythological method of literary representation : "Mr. Joyce is using the myth in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. He is pursuing a method which others must pursue".

A new genre. Joyce seriously experimented in a new literary genre. This is not a novel in the traditional understanding. "Ulysses" has one clue, a title, which does not help at all, as we shall not find Greek heroes here. Neither shall we find customary narrative, dialogue, comment and reverie. It is an ad hoc genre. Joyce prompted his critics putting into circulation the phrase "interior monologue".

Summary. The extract analyzed opens with a description of the sea as observed by Stephen, tortured by remorse and repentance. He hasn't fulfilled his mother's dying wish to kneel down and pray for her at her deathbed. Stephen is standing on the seashore looking at the tireless waves, thinking. He is gloomily thinking of his mother, whose ghost is pursuing him. He is thinking of the drowned man, whose corpse was drawn out of the sea at this spot several days ago. Imagining a decayed corpse, which has become a prey of fish, he muses on seadeath, the mildest of all possible deaths, and death in general. Frightened by the thunderstorm, he is returning to Dublin to continue his frustrated Odyssey through life. Nothing is happening here, but the fragment is full of the breath of the sea waves, of thoughts, allusions and associations, which continuously flow in Stephen's mind, as the waters of the Irish sea.

The general slant of the text. The text is pervaded with tragic gloom, poetic lyricism and sarcastic irony, which alternate and merge. With all its uneventfulness and disorderliness, the text is coherent, which is due to the reiteration of the topic of death. Stephen is obsessed with the idea of death. Death is being present permanently in his thoughts. He thinks of the drowned body, imagining all the naturalistic particulars of the decaying corpse. He broods upon the generations passing away. He aptly recalls a quotation from Shakespeare's "Tempest" ("Full fathom five thy father lies"). There is an implication of death in Tennyson's lines, where the spectre of his late mother is invisibly present. Stephen's broodings are shot through with mockery, irony and self-contempt. Frivolous irony springs up in his allusion to Mulligan's song "...hising up their petticoats". He blasphemously ruminates on God, who, creating man in his divine image, through a number of metamorphoses finally turns into “a featherbed mountain”. He cynically advertises seadeath rewarding it with Prix de Paris. He is mocking at Lord Tennyson, “ gentleman poet,” changing his title into “Lawn Tennyson” to indicate that a poet is above class distinctions. Along with gloom and blasphemy there are deeply poetic lines, devoted to the greenly-golden 1agoons, cups of rocks, the writhing weeds, the unfurling flower of the foam, the naked woman shining in her courts. So the permeating atmosphere is multi-dimensional, gloom, sarcasm and lyricism alternating and blending continually.

"Ulysses’s" narrative phantasmagoria. Stephen is alone on the seashore, but we have a perception of a densely populated world. "Ulysses" is full of voices sounding from so many parts of the city and from so many moments of the past, that its spatial clarity is blurred. We hear the voices of the appearing and disappearing author, Stephen's voice, talking with the waves, the weeds, the moon, those of the characters from Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, the imaginary voices of the boatmen, the rescuers of the corpse, the voices of the auctioneers and visitors of the Parisian Fair, the voices of the priests reading masses in Latin, the voice of Christ, the voices of the wanderers of distant epochs, who cannot find peace with themselves. An orchestra of voices, an orchestra of pronouns ( “I shall wait.” “ They are weary...” “thy father lies…” “We have him .” “ I thirst.” “Allbright he falls..” ” Just you give it a fair trial" ).

All the inanimate substances are presented as living beings. The waves speak, the waters breathe, whisper and sigh, the weeds "hise up their petticoats", the moon is tirelessly working...

Narratively, "Ulysses" is the most peculiar book of the century. It is a gigantic soliloquy( R. Aldington ), an ocean of erratic monologues packed with allusions, quotations, and associations. It is a constant fusion of voices and narrative stances which depends on the constant shifting of the point of view. There is no traditional inner speech, given in the Future-in-the past tense. Stephen's thoughts are rendered in the first person without quotation marks. Narrative stances alternate and fuse within a paragraph, within a sentence, which can begin in the third person and end in the first person. The absence of the omniscient voice brings about a shifting of narrative stances.

"Ulysses" is a portrayal of the inner world of the mind. As Joyce wanted to uncover the subterranean forces of "the unstructured consciousness", dreams and visions, a diffused pre-speech state, he had to elaborate a new narrative technique. This technique is qualified as the interior monologue technique, or the technique of free associations. Prior to Joyce, no writer had ever played with sensations, images, impulses, fancies and flashes of thought the way Joyce did. Joyce gave E.Dujarden's stream-of-consciousness a new life. He ventured to show exactly how the minds of people operate. He recorded the flow of his characters' thoughts and sensations , with all the complex associations attached to them, thus rendering the drama of cognition. The stream -of – consciousness carries the present and the past, unrestrained, boundless floods of associations, half-apprehended impressions of the outer world, phantasmagoria of imagination, the freely floating caprices of diffused thinking, the unpredictable impulses of liberated instincts, dreamy pictures of fantasy, fragmentary images..."He examines an ordinary mind on an ordinary day when this mind receives a myriad impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel" ( V. Woolf ). Joyce believed that only these subterranean forces of the mind , a fusion of recollections and associations can reveal a man.

Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness carries a mass of mental flotsam and jetsam, a myriad impressions, allusive, trivial, fantastic, which come from all sides, "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms” (V. Woolf ). Through his mind there float and converge snatches of talk, reminiscences, associations, fragments from different pieces of literature, jumbled phrases from Blake, Byron, Shakespeare , and elsewhere, references to the history of the Church, Europe, Ireland, the Homeric epic… Joyce records them as they fall upon Stephen’s mind, disconnected, disjointed, incoherent. They breed some rhythmic imaginative phrases for the poem.

The interior monologue is a basic means of characterization in “Ulysses”. It creates a picture of the inner personality. Stephen’s , Bloom’s, Molly’s interior monologues, being structurally similar, are different as to their contents. They carry the personages’ free associations, unique and individual thoughts and emotions, which represent unique, individual traits and properties of the characters’ consciousness. A. Bennett singled out the long unspoken monologue of Mrs. Bloom, which closes the book.: “It is a magical record of inmost thoughts of a woman… Nothing to surpass and equal it… It helps understand feminine psychology”.

Upon publication of "Ulysses" many writers were immediately enchanted by the throbbing of interior monologue, an endless diversion of psychological life, and the vast, not yet explored realms of the subconscious.

The "I" of "Ulysses". The "I" of the novel is split. It denotes the split consciousness of the author, the "I" of Stephen Dedalus, the allusive "I" of Odysseus and Telemachus, the "I" of humanity, wandering from epoc to epoch, reproducing themselves from the dead.

Joyce’s time and space. Joyce abandoned all attempts at logical and consistent presentation of facts. His universe is nonsimultaneous, never to be grasped in one act of apprehension. Everyone's status is continually shifting. "Ulysses" is not time-bound and historically entrapped. Its time is eternally drifting and shifting. The present and the past, the distant and the nearest are constantly fused . We plunge into differing temporal spheres: the immediate past ("he saw the writhing weeds..."), the immediate present ("she draws a toil of waters..."), into timeless present ("Dead breaths I living breathe..."), into near future ("Tuesday will be the longest day..."). There are two sorts of time here. One is objective, relegated to the background. The other is subjective, the basis of his depiction. The real interior action takes place in the subjective time of a rambling memory and capricious imagination.