When Bloom exits the pressroom to meet Alexander Keyes at Dillon’s Auctionrooms, Lenehan and J.

In the Aeolus episode, Bloom’s gait is parodied twice in quick succession, but each imitation conjures a separate and contradictory image. If imitation is not always the highest form of flattery, it at least implies individuality. In using contradictory descriptions of Bloom’s gait, Joyce challenges the very notion of our ability to interpret and assign symbolic meaning to the physical world. Bloom moves swiftly, independently, purposefully, unimpeded by mockery, and indeed casting a wake in which his mockers follow. As descriptions of Bloom’s style of movement accumulate, Joyce reveals that Mr. These descriptions of Bloom’s gait come adorned with literary devices that include allusions to the stork and the pard, creatures whose contradictory portrayals in ancient texts and medieval bestiaries inform and complicate our understanding of Leopold/Leopard. While Joyce does not satisfy the desire for an exact portrait of Bloom’s physical features, he does offer illuminative, contradictory, and metaphorically infused descriptions of the way Bloom moves through the world. Holbrook Jackson, the man on whom Joyce claimed to have based Bloom’s appearance (Beach 97), many readers must share this desire to “see” Bloom. Given that Sylvia Beach includes in her memoir a photograph of Mr. These descriptions might sate the reader of an ordinary character of fiction, but Ulysses’s presentation of a complete human’s thoughts, habits, and memories render disconcerting the absence of a commensurately detailed physical description. Still, a few precise details emerge over the course of the novel: he weighs 158 pounds ( U 17.91), is “five feet nine inches and a half” tall ( U 17.86-7), has “dark” eyes ( U 6.533), still has enough hair to pass his hand over ( U 5.22), notices that his body is “getting a bit softy” ( U 6.204-5), and is referred to as “old lardyface” ( U 12.1476-7). Troublingly in the context of this sense of intimacy, and despite all of Bloom’s rootedness in the physical world, Joyce withholds a satisfying description of Bloom’s physical appearance. Indeed, we may know more about Bloom than is possible to know about another human being. As readers, we join the meticulously detailed journey of Bloom and his thoughts, developing an unprecedented acquaintance with a fictional character.

Mapping the characters’ itineraries yields a network of dizzying circumlocutions, serendipitous crosses, and points stretching the edge of Dublin’s map. In contrast to the paralysis of Dubliners, Joyce’s Ulysses is a novel driven by movement. “Stork’s Legs” and “The Step of a Pard”: Bloom’s Gait

Bloom ulysses