Throughout the novel of Ulysses, Stephen will spend hours wandering along the beaches and city-streets surrounding Dublin. He will meet his fellow travelers, companions, and friends in various social and business situations inside the spectrum of the city. Some of these friends include Leopold Bloom, Buck Mulligan, Father Cowley, Nosey Flynn, the annonymous citizen. One of the journeys described in the Odyssey is that the ship of Ulysses must pass through a land of wandering moving rocks, whose jagged edges can tear open the hull of a wooden ship in an instant. Encompassing these waters and forever circling around this incessant vortex are the howling winds, springing from the four corners of the earth. The mythic winds from the north, south, east, and west move throughout space passing admist the boundaries of time into the outer reaches of some uncharted nether-world of sight mixed in unnamed sounds.
In choosing to place his characters inside this framework of mythic description, Joyce has decided to enter into the land of helios, a destination lost in the realms of space and time; the infinite void, eternal night, the meaninglessness of an existence without a spiritual concept of God, which describes in detail the dilemma of the post-modern world. Joyce leads his reader into the farthest reaches of the nihilistic mind; where the soul lacks nourishment, lying to await a barren fate in the parched sands of this wind torn desert. With-in the novel, two archetypes form, helping to lay a backdrop for the setting of Ulysses. Like scenery forming a backdrop for the theatrical stage, these two themes interplay with the plot of the novel: that of time-space and the second of the city of Dublin becoming a character. Dublin is filled with the lust of Circe, the gluttony of the lotus eaters, the terror of the meglomania of the Cyclops. So, through helios are these two aspects of setting introduced, and through these ever-changing winds are the remnants of their memories scattered. Through Helios, the debasement of light, is Dublin described. In doing so, Joyce captures the dilemma of the modern man in search of his inner soul, the inner sanctum of the mind in a world thrown into chaos.
"The city, Dublin is dichotomized in the same way. Dublin is a character in the novel, as fictional and as real as Bloom and Stephen. It is shown for the most part in its most negative aspects, although the language of its inhabitants is vivid and
