Ulysses is a work of genius and deserves to be read

By footnote_cliff1986

Every chapter feels like it’s taking some writing “idea” and just going hard with it—like a long walk through time and all the weird things prose can do. It’s almost like you’re reading one continuous day, but each part is also its own little experiment. And the timing is nuts: it’s pretty much real-time, mostly sitting inside one person’s head. If you’re reading it straight through, each chapter takes about an hour. It’s like the whole book is a normal human day from morning to early dawn—minus the sleep part. It also starts around 8am and runs until the early morning of June 17th. There are 18 episodes that line up with the Odyssey, but the whole setup feels almost like that old-school Catholic Latin mass vibe too. Like the first line is basically “I’m going to the altar,” which is such a specific choice that I still don’t fully get why it works as well as it does. What gets me most is how accurate the dialogue feels. I actually asked some older relatives about old Irish bits of speech that show up, like “Begob,” “By God,” and “Bejaysus,” and they started remembering relatives who’d been gone for ages. It’s this whole vanished culture just walking around on the page—nobody talks like that now. Joyce also doesn’t seem interested in making anything “easier” to get into. It’s all sincere and detailed, like he’s basically saying the everyday annoying little life of some regular dude still counts as art. And yeah, it gets heavy: the suicide in Stephen’s family, him pulling away, then Bloom’s kid passing and everything turning colder between him and his wife. Just all the petty cruelty and awkward little routines of the day. It sounds awful when I put it like that, but somehow the writing makes it feel real and important instead of just depressing. The prose is unreal—like some of the best I’ve ever read. Even that one line about the “Heaventree of stars…” thing. It’s weird and gorgeous. It’s not even just poetic for no reason either, it feels packed with references and it still works out loud. Like it’s got that “night blue” thing going on, and the whole sentence just sticks in your head. The book is full of that kind of stuff. And I love the “big dot” moment in the Ithaca chapter. It just feels like the book is slowly pulling back—like someone gently showing you the whole planet and how tiny you are, then acting like it’s all both meaningless and meaningful at the same time. Which is kind of the point, I guess: we literally spent a whole day inside three heads, and then it ends with Molly and Leopold. Molly’s unfaithful, Leopold is… Leopold, and yeah the book implies some pretty gross stuff about him (lol). But even with all the mess, it still lands on this weird life-affirming note—like that “Yes I said yes…” ending. Two people stuck loving each other right up until they can’t anymore.