James Joyce's Ulysses, first published in Paris in 1922, follows a few Dubliners through a single ordinary day, June 16, 1904, and turns that day into an exhaustive portrait of consciousness, a city and the modern novel's possibilities. The book loosely maps Homer's Odyssey onto its characters. Leopold Bloom, a gentle, curious, half-Jewish advertising canvasser, is Odysseus. Stephen Dedalus, the brilliant, grieving young writer from Joyce's earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, plays Telemachus. Bloom's wife Molly, who Bloom knows will meet her lover Blazes Boylan that afternoon, is a very unfaithful Penelope. Bloom eats breakfast, attends a funeral, tries to sell an ad, eats lunch, wanders through pubs, a library, a maternity hospital and the brothel district, and finally brings an exhausted Stephen home.
What makes the novel singular is its method. Each of its eighteen episodes is written in a different style. They range from stream-of-consciousness interior monologue to newspaper headlines, parodies of the whole history of English prose, a hallucinatory play script and a cold question-and-answer catechism. The book ends with Molly's unpunctuated monologue drifting toward sleep and her famous closing "yes." Joyce packs the novel with Dublin's actual streets, shops, songs and gossip, and gives full attention to bodily life, from eating and defecation to desire, which led to its prosecution for obscenity. It was banned in the United States until a 1933 court ruling. Ulysses is demanding, often very funny and deeply humane, and it remains a central text of literary modernism. It shows how much meaning and beauty can be found in the textures of an unremarkable day.