Joyce structured Ulysses as a modern Odyssey. Each episode corresponds to an adventure from Homer, has its own technique, symbol, color, and organ of the body.
Stephen wakes in the Martello tower with Buck Mulligan and Haines. The usurpers possess his home. "The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea."
Stephen teaches at Mr. Deasy's school in Dalkey. History is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake.
Stephen walks the strand, thinking. "Ineluctable modality of the visible." The sea changes, language changes, all is flux.
Bloom prepares breakfast. The kidney. Molly in bed. A letter from Milly. The ordinary day begins its extraordinary course.
Bloom collects Martha's letter, observes communicants, buys lemon soap. The languid enchantments of escape.
The funeral of Paddy Dignam. Bloom thinks of death - his father Rudolf's suicide, his son Rudy dead at eleven days.
The press roars. Headlines interrupt. The editor orates. Wind and hot air blow through Prince's Street.
Bloom, hungry, walks. The Burton disgusts him. At Davy Byrne's: gorgonzola and burgundy. Food becomes thought.
Stephen's Shakespeare theory: the ghost is Shakespeare himself. Bloom passes through like another ghost.
Nineteen short sections crisscross Dublin. The city as organism, as labyrinth, as machine.
A fugue. Bronze by gold, the barmaids. Simon Dedalus sings. Bloom writes to Martha. Music fills every line.
The Citizen's nationalism vs. Bloom's internationalism. "Love... the opposite of hatred." A biscuit tin flies.
Gerty MacDowell in sentimental prose. Bloom watches. Fireworks. The style shifts to Bloom's earthy reality.
Mina Purefoy gives birth. English prose evolves through nine months of styles - Anglo-Saxon to modern slang.
The brothel. Drama form. Hallucinations riot. Bloom is transformed. Stephen confronts his mother's ghost.
Father and son, Bloom and Stephen, drink coffee. Exhausted prose. A sailor tells tales. Rest before return.
Catechism form. Question and answer. Cocoa is made. The universe is measured. Stephen leaves. Bloom sleeps.
Molly's monologue. Eight sentences without punctuation. Memory, desire, affirmation. Howth. The seed cake. Yes.