Scarica Ulysses Joyce: plot, setting, style e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Ulysses PLOT The whole novel takes place on a single day, Thursday, June 16, 1904, which was special to Joyce because it was the day that Nora Barnacle, his future wife, made her love clear to him. During the course of this day, three main characters wake up, have various encounters in Dublin and go to sleep eighteen hours later. The central character, Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser and non-practicing Jew, is Joyce’s common man. He leaves his home at eight o’clock to buy his breakfast and returns finally at two the following morning; in the hours in- between, he lands on the shores of many streets, attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight. During his wanderings, Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus, who is the alienated protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and who becomes, momentarily, his adopted son: the alienated common man rescues the alienated artist from a brothel, and takes him home where the paralysis of their fatigue prevents them from achieving a personal communion. Finally, there is Bloom’s wife, Molly, a voluptuous singer who is planning an afternoon of adultery with her music director. SETTING Ulysses is the climax of Joyce’s creativity and sums up the themes and techniques he had developed in his previous works. It was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day and Joyce planned each movement of each character on each street as though he were playing chess. He placed them in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented, walking on cobblestones he retraced. He made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the feeling, the place, almost indistinguishable, certainly inseparable, from his human characters. Consequently, Dublin becomes itself a character in this novel. THE RELATION TO THE ODYSSEY As its title suggests, Ulysses is related to Homer’s great epic the Odyssey, the tale of Ulysses and his travels after the Trojan War. Joyce used the Odyssey as a structural framework for his book, arranging its characters and events around Homer’s heroic model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as his son Telemachus and Molly as the faithful Penelope. Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes, as its chapters are usually called: ‘Telemachiad’ (chapters 1-3), ‘Odyssey’ (chapters 4-15), ‘Nostos’ (chapters 16-18), embodying the three main characters, and imitating the three parts of the Odyssey. While the Homeric parallels are the most important structural device in the novel, each chapter is additionally organised around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter. THEMES Stephen Dedalus, Mr Bloom and Mrs Bloom are more than individuals: they represent two aspects of human nature. Stephen is pure intellect and embodies every young man seeking maturity; in his stream of consciousness, usually stimulated by sense impressions, he associates things by resemblance. Mrs Bloom stands for flesh, since she identifies herself totally with her sensual nature and fecundity; her train of thought, while she is lying in the darkness at night, is carried on by her own memories, one triggering another by a kind of association which is simply literal (for example one man in her life reminds her of another). Mr Bloom, uniting the extremes, is everybody, the whole of mankind; in his stream of consciousness things are linked by cause and effect or by being near in space and time. The theme of the novel, implied by the quest or journey, is moral: human life means suffering, falling but also struggling to rise and seek the good. STYLE
