Telemachos meet when Telemachos returns to Ithaka from his own search for his father; meanwhile, Odysseus himself has landed on Ithaka after a twenty-year absence. For Bloom in Ulysses, the comrade is the son of one of his friends young Stephen Dedalus, who has intellectual aspirations but whose impoverished background forces him to work as a teacher in a boys' school. Bloom and Stephen meet in an evening of pub crawling in Dublin's Nighttown, when Bloom keeps Stephen from being arrested by a constable, Corny Kelleher, when Stephen gets into a fight with some Oxford students and some soldiers on leave. In The Odyssey, Odysseus and Telemachos cooperate in killing the suitors. When that is accomplished, Odysseus, who has been in disguise, reveals himself to Penelope, thus restoring their marriage and the family. In Ulysses, on the way home from Nighttown, the father figure Bloom and the younger Stephen, who feels closer to Bloom than to his own alcoholic and socially pretentious father, discover that their tastes in art, politics, women, Ireland, friendship, and much else besides are quite similar (Joyce 544). Over a pot of tea, they gradually become sober as they talk from early morning hours until dawn, when Stephen goes to his own home. Bloom watches the sunrise, troubled by the fact that he has been cuckolded repeatedly by his wife Molly. But, concluding that he and she are bound by physical familiarity and emotional experience, instead of planning any kind of revenge of "retribution" via divorce or deliberate mental cruelty (Joyce 602-3), he goes to his wife's bed.
Joyce's intention to follow the lead of The Odyssey in constructing the action of Ulysses is evident in the fact that both Odysseus and Bloom undergo a long journey. Although Joyce and Homer conceptualize journey from significantly different perspectives, they both deal with radically important psychoemotional levels of human experience. The odyssey of Odysseus is defi...