What Did James Joyce Mean When He Wrote Ulysses Anyway ?
some lost bard staight out of "Beowulf." Next Joyce is doing Chaucer, then Spenser, then Marlowe, then Shakespeare, then Jonson, plus lots of obscure poets we pretty much have to take the Joyce industry's word for. As Mrs. Purefroy strains to bring her pregnancy to term, Joyce is doing the same with the long-gestating English language, giving us a whirlwind rundown of all the developmental stages leading up to its culmination in "Ulysses." (4)
Joyce was able to foresee the totality of the evolution of the English language, and he was able within the confines of a novel to show this in the swift roundabout discussion between University students on summer evening in Dublin. Dialect alone would place this novel in the ranks of some of the best books of literature, but there are more secrets waiting for the reader to discover in Ulysses. These gems make the book a pearl among the classic great books of the ages. Joyce was a master at running syllables and sounds together, pulling them around, and producing new words. He could also borrow from the rich history of the English language, and once he was able to combine these sounds with his own personal heritage, he was able to capture the flow of narrative that few writers could have ever imagined.
Another gem buried beneath the pages of Ulysses is the attention grabber, the last chapter. The novel is composed of eighteen chapters, each individual parts working inside the novel to convey a theme of the journey of Western man. In the modern age, there may not be the physical monstors of ancient folklore to slay, but when a man faces the outside world in the grasps of the modern city, he must mentally face the same monstors of the mind that his ancestors faced in their own primeval world of a prehistoric past. There are still dragons to slay and they inhabit the mind as demons laying traps for the gullbable innocent man to accidentally open, and once having opened these snares of the mind, many a man or woman has found themselves lost in an internal hell of the soul, where the abyss awaits like a huge gaping black hole, whose depths are endless in the specturm of moment. By the end of the novel, the characters in Ulysses have faced some of these horrific mythos beasts, and as Harold Bloom falls asleep in the recesses of his own bed, his subconscous flows for the purity of mankind to see. In this way, Joyce presents a method of healing for the modern soul.
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