Eumaeus

The first thing I noticed about this episode was its resemblance to the Nausicaa episode. Bloom shifts out of his heroic role and back into his social obliviousness. Like Gerty, Bloom makes more of his relationship to Stephen than is actually there. Like Bloom in Nausicaa, Stephen does little to correct this misunderstanding. The narrator and perhaps Joyce's ideal reader also makes this mistake: "Thought they didn't see eye to eye on everything, a certain analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train of thought." Stephen, who barely utters a word the whole time, does not appear to share this sentiment.

One especially obvious moment is when Bloom hears Italian in the streets and comments on the language's beauty. He asks Stephen why he doesn't write poetry in Italian and Stephen somewhat cruelly tells him: "They were haggling over money." Bloom takes know notice when Stephen points out that he is looking at things shallowly.

The narrative seems to be an approximation of what Bloom's writing would be like if he followed through with his periodic impulses to submit something. Joyce jokingly alludes to this fact in Bloom's consciousness. "My Experiences in a Cabman's Shelter" could be what we are actually reading. The narrative also seems like a convergence between the styles of the earlier episodes and the storyteller style implied by the sailor.

One thing I couldn't really figure out was the significance of the sailor's Odysseus-ness. He wanders the sea and hasn't seen his wife or son in seven years - a lover of adventures. Maybe this is just another device to emphasize the difference between Bloom and the traditional hero - an assertion that's made quite a lot in this strangely anticlimactic episode.