“Ulysses was Joyce’s attempt to present humanity as it is. It was Humanity as it happens in a day of the life of Dublin.” Mark Patrick Hederman
Although James Joyce’s “Ulysses” has a lot of characters describing the events of a single day, the three main characters of Ulysses are Leopold Bloom, Marion (Molly) Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.
As the tradition continues, readers might quite be familiar with Stephen Dedalus whom we have already met in “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, where he struggles to find his way between art, politics and religion as they interfere amongst each other due to Stephens previous education. Although here Stephen finally rejects church authority, he is nonetheless shaped by his Jesuit education and by a powerfully
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She is Bloom’s wife but since their son Rudy died about ten years ago, she and her husband did not have sexual intercourse. Her appearance in the novel takes a small part but she is felt throughout . The last episode in Ulysses, known also as Penelope or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy presents the thoughts of Molly Bloom and as Schiller points out: “She is not telling anybody a story but simply living her life in the story.” This makes it a little bit difficult for the reader to exactly say what kind of religious woman Molly was, but we can see through the lines she was a catholic too. And like Bloom himself, Molly felt an outsider in Dublin due to her upbringing in Gibraltar. We do not know a lot about her past
Our fourth major character would be the city of Dublin itself.
Joyce was a socialist, and whatever else it may be about, Ulysses certainly raises the issue of anti-Semitism .
To sum up, we may assume that Stephen, Bloom and Molly were as many real people in our modern lives are, saints and sinners. He was described by Joyce in the best possible manner, by depicting the reality of the human kind. And although Stephen might be a nonbeliever, knowing that Joyce’s books describe his biography as well, we can say that he wasn’t an atheist but he believed that the humanity being presented, endorsed, canonized by the church was fake