Ulysses by James Joyce, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Ulysses by James Joyce e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ULYSSES (Paris, 1922) Ulysses is a novel that take place in Dublin from 8 o’clock on June 16th 1904 until 2 o’clock in the morning of June 17th, a special day for Joyce because was the day that Nora Barnacle made her fondness clear to him. Leopold Bloom is the central character and is a middle-aged advertising agent and non-practicing Jew that represents Joyce’s common man. He leaves his home at 8 o’clock to buy breakfast and returned at 2 of the following morning; in the hours in-between he attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight. During his wanderings he meets Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of another Joyce’s work called “A portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”, a young intellectual who starts to write books and is looking for a house and a figure of a father, that founds in Leopold. After having analyzed Bloom’s morning and his tasks, in the afternoon starts to wandering in Dublin and finally meets Stephen, with which decides to go in a pub. After having drank, they left the pub for a brothel in which the drunk Stephen instigates scuffle. Then Leopold tries to defend his friend’s image and reputation convincing him to turn back home, where the two begin a long conversation about the different vicissitudes that the two have lived in their lives up to that moment with the Joyce’s exploration of their unconscious mind. The final chapter is dedicated to Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. She is a voluptuous opera singer aware about her sensuality, who betrayed her husband with her music teacher. In the last chapter she pronounced 20.000 words of interior monologue while she is lying in bed thinking over her day; her soliloquy touched various scene of his past life and in particular her husband Leopold and invites the reader to share the stream of her thoughts. Her erotic phantasies are showed in the last few lines of her stream of consciousness, and it represents the attempt of Joyce to make readers aware about her erotism. Molly remembered the day when Leopold proposed himself to her, but she knew other man and also kissed them. In the end she married Bloom because was the only one who proposed to her. Through this, Joyce states the lack of passion and love that characterized modern people. The book was quite shocking because had clear references to sex, in fact the public reacted badly considered it obscene. In this novel Joyce wanted to describe the plenty details about the characters of that day but not only their activities, specially their mental process and that’s why he made wide use of stream of consciousness. In fact the novel doesn’t have a specific plot because is a sequence of descriptions and stream of consciousness. Joyce at the end of his life had a bad disease in eyes and became quite blind, that’s why he was obsessed with sounds and was very careful in choosing words. He also invented the word “QUARK”, a fusion between question and mark, because a lot of people asked questions about his book. MYTH: The novel makes use of the myth of Ulysses recorded in Homer’s Odyssey, the tale of Odysseus and his travel after the Trojan War, and uses it as a structural framework arranging its characters and events around Homer’s epic model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope. The novel is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes: “Telemachiad”, “Odyssey”, “Nostos” embodying the three main characters and imitating the three parts of Odyssey. The Homeric parallels in the novel are realized thanks to both analogy and antithesis and each chapter is additionally organized around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter. The figure of Ulysses symbolizes an heroic person who never feels tired to look for knowledge, in fact travelled in Mediterranean Sea and met a lot of mythologic creatures. Instead Bloom isn’t heroic, never goes out of Dublin and is lacking of trust, love and passion.