An Aid to Reading Ulysses Author:David Butler From the Introduction: "Although James Joyce spent almost the entirety of his adult life in voluntary exile in Continental Europe, he wrote obsessively and exclusively about one place only: the city of his birth. So clear in his mind was the project of recording the minutiae of the Edwardian city that he was able to say of Ulysses to his friend ... more »Frank Budgen that he desired 'to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if hte city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.' What is more, the novel's action is famously set within the confines of a single day, June 16th, 1904, so that Ulysses is also an encyclopaedic chronicle of that most fundamental unit of human time, with all its emotions, desires, frustrations and bodily necessities.
But Ulysses is far more than the portrait of a city or of the biological clock. In a letter to his friend Carlo Linati which accompanied the first of the explanatory frameworks (or 'schemata') that Joyce drew up to show how clever his book was, he explained "It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human as well as a little story of a day (life)...' The novel's title, meanwhile, suggest the epic wanderings of Odysseus (or Ulysses in its Latin form), with which Bloom's Dublin odyssey has mock-heroic parallels. So how are we to approach this most complete, but most comic and rewarding of books?"
Following pages include one for each "Episode" with notes on the parallels with the Odyssey, Literary Technique (e.g. Catechism), Art, and Further Comments.« less