After World War I Joyce returned for a few months to Trieste, and then—at the invitation of American poet and Modernist Ezra Pound—in July 1920 he went to Paris. His novel Ulysses was published there on February 2, 1922, by Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Ulysses is constructed as a modern parallel to Homer’s Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic that follows the wanderings of its hero, Odysseus (Ulysses), after the Trojan War. All of the action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day (June 16, 1904). The three central characters—Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Leopold Bloom, and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope. Many of the novel’s characters are also based on friends, family members, and acquaintances of Joyce; for example, Stephen’s friend “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” is modeled on Oliver St. John Gogarty. Through the use of interior monologue, Joyce reveals the innermost thoughts and feelings of these characters as they live hour by hour, passing from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital, and brothel.

The main strength of Ulysses lies in its depth of character portrayal and its breadth of humor. Yet the book is most famous for its use of a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. Joyce claimed to have taken this technique from a largely forgotten French writer, Édouard Dujardin, who had used interior monologues in his 1888 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés (We’ll to the Woods No More), but many critics have pointed out that it is at least as old as the novel, though no one before Joyce had used it so continuously. Joyce’s major innovation was to carry the interior monologue one step further by rendering, for the first time in literature, the myriad flow of impressions, half thoughts, associations, lapses and hesitations, incidental worries, and sudden impulses that form part of the individual’s conscious awareness along with the trend of rational thoughts. This stream-of-consciousness technique proved widely influential in much 20th-century fiction.

Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness typified the radical experimentation of Modernist writing. Modernism, which flourished in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, was a movement that sought to break with the past and find new forms of expression. The era was characterized by industrialization, the nearly global adoption of capitalism, rapid social change, and advances in science and the social sciences, such as Freudian theory. All of these changes and developments appear in Ulysses, with its thoroughly urban setting amid the various business establishments and civic life of Dublin and its preoccupation with the inner life of its characters.

The technical and stylistic devices in Ulysses are abundant, particularly in the much-praised “Oxen of the Sun” chapter (Episode 14), in which the language goes through every stage in the development of English prose from Anglo-Saxon to the present day to symbolize the growth of a fetus in the womb. The effect of these devices is often to add intensity and depth, as, for example, in the “Aeolus” chapter (Episode 7) set in a newspaper office, with rhetoric as the theme. Joyce inserted into it hundreds of rhetorical figures and many references to winds—something “blows up” instead of happening, people “raise the wind” when they are getting money—and the reader becomes aware of an unusual liveliness in the very texture of the prose. The famous last chapter of the novel, in which readers follow the stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom as she lies in bed, gains much of its effect from being written in eight huge unpunctuated paragraphs.

Ulysses, which was already well known because of censorship troubles, became immediately famous upon publication. Joyce had prepared for its critical reception by having a lecture given by Valery Larbaud, who pointed out the Homeric correspondences in it and that “each episode deals with a particular art or science, contains a particular symbol, represents a special organ of the human body, has its particular colour…proper technique, and takes place at a particular time.” Joyce never published this scheme; indeed, he even deleted the chapter titles in the book as printed. It may be that this scheme was more useful to Joyce when he was writing than it is to the reader.