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 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 Kelleh...