What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ?
allegory. But, Ulysses is a tighter, more technically compact work of art. In creating Ulysses, Joyce not only created an epic, but he also developed a technique borrowed from Homer. Using both the narrative flow of The Illiad and the theme of the journey found in The Odyssey, Joyce was able to produce a novel that took the use of the journey to new heights, for Ulysses is a novel that uses the journey of a wandering spirit, and places that journey in the allegorical symbology of the human mind. Here lay the genius of James Joyce; for he was able to take the psychology of Freud and Jung, the metaphysical ideas of the East, the allegorical symbols of the West, along with the use of a small bit of Irish history, and mix these elements together within the boundaries of the English language to produce a literary masterpiece.
On a concrete level, Ulysses works because of certain techniques that Joyce used while composing the novel. Ulysses turned into an experiment operating inside of the mind of Joyce. It seems that he decided to break all of the boundaries set before him by other novelists. It is a fun read for the literary scholar, and for the layman who recognizes the elements at work in the story. Four elements that are related to style and form in the novel to observe are: chapter fourteen in which Harold Bloom and Stephen Daedulus, the main character, are engaged in a lively conversation on the history of English literature with a group of Dublin University students, the role of the journeys of Odysseus and how they relate to each chapter in the novel of Ulysses, the last chapter where Joyce wrote all literary conventions by composing a novel with no punctuation mixed with pure Irish thought and dialect, his use of metaphor and symbols many drawing from the unique qualities of a beautiful Irish past running througout the narrative. Another device used by Joyce to grab the reader's attention, and one that seemed to excite the literary world was his attempt to compress time in the pages of a novel, and to record everything that happens to one man on one day June 16, 1901. Not only does he try to describe the physical world of Dublin operating on that one particuar day, but he attempts to capture what is working inside the minds of several of the characters in the book. As Harold Bloom falls asleep at the end of the novel, all of his thoughts run amock at once, and the reader is able to
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