Ulysses
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead—and so begins a single ordinary day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin. The novel follows three figures: Stephen Dedalus, a brilliant, grieving young teacher haunted by his mother's death; Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser wandering the city while avoiding thoughts of his wife's afternoon infidelity; and Molly Bloom, whose memories close the book. Across eighteen episodes loosely mirroring Homer's Odyssey, Bloom and Stephen drift through funerals, pubs, a newspaper office, a maternity hospital, and a brothel before their paths finally converge, the older man offering the younger a kind of fatherly refuge.
Ulysses transforms one unremarkable day into an epic of consciousness, rendering thought, sensation, and memory through ever-shifting styles and the famous stream-of-consciousness technique. It probes paternity, exile, desire, faith, and the quiet heroism of ordinary life. Endlessly inventive and exuberantly comic, it remade the modern novel and remains a towering monument of twentieth-century literature.
How it begins
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: — Introibo ad altare Dei . Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: —Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit! Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly. —Back to barracks! he said sternly. He added in a preacher’s tone: —For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.