er, 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 defined by physical distance and a significant length of time, during which Odysseus undergoes the transformation of twenty years in age and encounters new discovery. For Bloom, the length of time of the story is one day, and the novel Ulysses compresses the whole of human experience and memory into that day's thought processes, expression and implication of needs, and desires of Bloom. Bloom's discovery is also not one of physical, manifest adventure but rather an adventure of the mind and psychological emotion, the in...