Hades

in Hades, Joyce subjects small and seemingly irrelevant objects to absurd repetition.

Hats, for example, appear throughout the episode, and when they don't their absence is explicitly described. Their significance looses some of its vagueness at the funeral - they are symbols of polite respect for the dead when they are removed. They also seem to be a comforting sort of distraction for Bloom as evidenced by his preoccupation with the engraving on his own hat in the Calypso episode. Bloom's hat seemed to interrupt his tension with and exclusion from his wife. Bloom's exclusion from Menton's memory is somewhat challenged when, at the end of the episode, Bloom points out Menton's dented hat. The hat-as-distraction symbology isn't perfect though. Boylan enters the scene and Bloom's troubled mind with a flash of his "white saucer".

Statues litter the route of the funeral carriage as it makes its way to the cemetery. They serve as landmarks not only for the journey into the underworld but for Blooms' thought, and in some instances, the conversation of the four men in the carriage. They are monuments of dead men, like the shades that approach Odysseus in his journey. There is a lot to uncover here.

The color white also pervades the episode. White horses are demanded by traditional Irish funeral rites. On page 100, "Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shpes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures in the air." Ghosts inhabit this chapter; in the statues, in Bloom's thought of his dead father and son, in Boylan's white hat, and even in the "white" rotting organs of the corpses.

On a somewhat separate note, there is a prevalent theme in this episode of appropriateness versus the opposite of that. The context of a funeral imposes unnatural social restrictions on these characters - especially Bloom. At Bloom's prodding, the four men discuss the shameless behavior of Reuben Dodd until Cunningham cuts their laughter short; reminding them that they should be in mourning. The caretaker tells a joke, and Bloom thinks of the clown-gravediggers in Hamlet as the coffin is lowered. Aside from comedy, Bloom's mind brings other seemingly irreverent things to the death rite. He is preoccupied with practicality and makes comments to himself and others on the engineering of funerals as if they were products or a business. They should use trams instead of carriages to prevent spills. They should bury the dead standing up. Cremation is better. The money for these expensive headstones should be spent on more important things. These thoughts, whether Bloom expresses them to his peers or not, seem to align themselves with his isolation. When he suggests that a sudden death is better than a slow one, the other three immediately see his non-Catholicism. It does not occurred to Bloom that a man who dies suddenly cannot repent for his sins.

Bloom continues to be supernaturally linked to Stephen. Proteus and Hades both begin at 11AM. This allows for the possibility that Stephen's rejection of his father and Bloom's longing for fatherhood occur simultaneously. The same could be said of Stephen's thoughts on "seadeath" and Bloom's silent proposal that drowning is the better way to die.