The purpose of this research is to examine the central character's attempt to reconcile the domestic affairs of his household in The Odyssey of Homer and James Joyce's Ulysses. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the actions of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and Odysseus in The Odyssey occur in this connection and then to discuss the means by which the unfolding narratives in the respective stories demonstrate Bloom's an Odysseus's strategies for seizing control of their emotional lives.
The action of both The Odyssey and Ulysses involve the wandering from home of the central characters, although the wandering assumes a different shape in each story. In The Odyssey, Odysseus travels by an extremely indirect route back to home and hearth where faithful and patient Penelope awaits him and where he kills all the suitors who have been courting her in his absence. The journey takes ten years. In Ulysses, Bloom departs from and returns home within the space of one day. Waiting for him is his wife Molly, who has been unfaithful to him from time to time, with Blazes Boylan, a concert promoter (Joyce 76-77). The narrative action of both The Odyssey and Ulysses contains much digression. Whereas The Odyssey describes Odysseus's wanderings from Troy to Ithaka throughout the various islands and shores of the Mediterranean over ten years, Ulysses describes Bloom's wanderings around Dublin in the course of just one day. Yet as a narrative structure, The Odyssey is far more compressed than Ulysses, which ranges far and wide in style and content and takes far longer to resolve than The Odyssey.
Both Bloom and Odysseus have a comrade in a portion of their travels. For Odysseus it is his grown son Telemachos, who attempts without success to drive Penelope's suitors away (II.135-45) and then sets sail in search of his father and in hope of finding a way to drive the suitors from Penelope's door. In The Odyssey, Odysseus and ...