The winds of time seem to rush upon the reader in Ulysses in slowly encroaching waves, whose sovereign tips curl around the edges of the human subconscience. Amongst the breaking rushing waters of the metaphysical soul, lying beneath the deeper undercurrents of cultural metaphor, rests the essence, a sort of eternal root running throughout the heart of the novel. This root resembles a vein slicing towards the inner core of human understanding, helping to bridge the gap between the surreal world of the imagination, and the practical vision of the human dialectic. For in the final analysis, Ulysses is just not a story; some piece of prose enhancing dramatic drama with character, rising action, falling into conclusion. The words move across the page pulling from literary references, symbology, the wordplay of languages including the Greek tongue, Latin, and the ancient Irish/ Celtic tongue. These qualities mark Ulysses as a work of art by a genius working within the realms of craft mixed with an array of wordplay that moves along the cultural abyss of metaphor and illusion. Joyce walks in the deepest of frozen recesses of the mind, saving such thoughts from the silence of oblivion with the magic of literature.
With Ulysses, James Joyce had created a piece of prose that transcended the boundaries of time in reason itself. He had taken the art of the novel towards a new higher level. Joyce understood that certain concepts wrapped around mythological symbolism blended into illusion could produce a novel that spoke for the ages. Time is the fabric that holds good literature together, and Joyce understood this link, this sort of internal glue that held the pages of literature together as the oceans tide marks the rythmn of the everchanging waves of nature's neverending eternity. The characters created by Joyce in Ulysses grasp the reader using the same method that a line of poetical meter by Homer surrounds an audience, lifting the spirit towards a higher level, embracing the human ideal in a metaphysical form. Thus, was Joyce able to create a literary epic for the twentieth century. In "The Book As Word", Marilyn French describes this type of structural symbiosis in further detail. Her writing comes across with a richer deeper meaning in regard to clarity that James Joyce sought to express with Ulysses.
"To identify all times is to assert the circular nature of time, eternal recurrence, which underlies Ulysses as well as Finnegan's Wake. The characters are pitted against the circle of time;
