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James Joyce’s Ulysses and the Narrative of Exile
Jessica Morreale
Mentor: Margot Norris
The starting point for this paper was a series of two workshop-oriented summer schools dedicated to James Joyce. At both the one-week program in Trieste, Italy, and the two-week program in Dublin, Ireland, I met and worked with undergraduates, doctoral students, professors and Joyce enthusiasts from around the world through a series of lectures and workshops. This paper examines the idea of an exile that separates Leopold Bloom from the general Dublin population in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Bloom, in his wanderings throughout the day, exhibits several instances of separation from his surrounding community, many of which have to do with either religion, ethnicity or sensibility. Although Bloom has been baptized, more than once, he is largely unfamiliar with the beliefs and customs of the Christian church (including both Catholic and Protestant churches), which is a culture inextricable from the Irish community. At the same time, there are moments when individuals in Dublin express an inability to understand Bloom in the context of their own community. Several examples of this occur in the “Cyclops” chapter, in which Bloom is subject to both verbal and physical anti-Semitic attacks. Through these differing narrative perspectives, the reader can begin to glimpse a disconnection between Bloom and the people around him: he is in a sense doubly exiled by his inability to understand Dublin culture, and its inability to understand him.