James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) takes place in and around Dublin on a single day, June 16, 1904. The novel follows three central characters: Stephen Dedalus (the hero of Joyce’s earlier autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man); Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser; and his wife, Molly Bloom, a professional singer. 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.
Ulysses uses as its structure Homer’s Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic that follows the wanderings of its hero, Odysseus (Ulysses), after the Trojan War. Stephen, Bloom, and Molly are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, respectively. However, they are also richly imagined characters in their own right and have some autobiographical elements. Many of the other characters are based on Joyce’s friends, with allusions to mythological figures and people and events in Irish history. By using an epic as its foundation, Joyce’s novel makes the point that the mundane lives of modern Dubliners are as important as the monumental lives of literature’s great heroes.