Mobilization In James Joyce's Ulysses

The armistice of 11th November 1918 brought the Great War to an end. At the time, the agreement signed in a train carriage at Compiegne was not perceived by soldiers as the end of the war, but as an indefinite period of cease fire. Truce was not peace. Troops being stationed where they had fought, conflict outbreaks in Russia, Turkey or Ireland, and the allies’ need to press Germany into accepting their peace treaty, including the difficulties of a rapid reconfiguration of the wartime economy for the requirements of peace, were the reasons why troops were still kept under arms. The demobilization started slowly in 1919. Soldiers’ homecoming was to take a long time, many prisoners who were in Russia returned home as late as 1921-1922. In fact,

The first is the one which inspired the title of this research and to which I owe my choice to be in Dublin – James Joyce’s Ulysses, published at the end of the Great War. It tells the odyssey of a mere man, who is neither a king, nor is he helped by gods in his journey home . Indeed, Leopold Bloom’s voyage through Dublin, a subtle parralel to the north-south mediterranean voyage of the Greek Ulysses and Bloom’s Dublin one, descending into the inferno of daily life, the missions and obstacles of the modern man compared to those of ancient myth are what Bloom and Ulysses

Gathering Clouds tells the battlefront experience of an educated young man who finds himself taking part in the great slaughter. He is wounded and is taken back to recover, by train, and this places him at the train carriage window where during and after the war he sadly notices the death of the old world and the birth of a new and hopeless one. The war-induced trauma is subtly symbolised by a disfiguring wound, like a stygma that every man who took part in the fighting has, that of being a killer, no matter how just the cause. To the hero Radu Comsa the demobilisation never ends, hei s still a prisoner in the trenches of an imaginary battle, disappointed in the new world full of upstarts, profiteers and godless