Helios: A Journey To The Land Of The Whispering Winds.
moment of death. It is the modern dilemna, and it is this question that the novel seeks to answer for everyman through the characterizations of Stephen Dadelus and Harold Bloom. In the conversations between Stephen and his companions at work and in the tavern, he will often refer to their lives as being mere "shadows" in the reference to the spectrum of life. It is this Platonic concept that Joyce wished to describe in the conversations of philosophic thought ranging throughout the novel, and a place of reference that he felt that the answer to the existential dilemna of the modern man might be sought. One example of Stephen's preoccupation with the world of shadows can be seen in the conversation that occurs between Stephen, his literary companions, and the librarian at the public library, as they discuss the play Hamlet in the midmorning light of a gloomy Dublin day.
"As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelly says, is a fading coal that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be." (3)
It is this idea that man is a mere reflection of his true real self that Joyce was attempting to study in the novel, and it is in these pages of description that Joyce will seek his answer, and resolution that Ulysses eventually leads the reader, as he travels with the characters created by Joyce through the streets of Dublin.
In building a novel around the mythic character of Ulysses, James Joyce was describing this mental existential struggle of the modern man trapped in the dying ashes of a decaying world. Homer told a mythic tale of a warrior who leaves his home in Greece on a ship with his most trusted band of warriors. While exploring some of the uncharted waters and oceans that surrounded
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