A plain-English guide to reading Ulysses.

How to use this guide

Joyce keeps changing the rules. Almost every episode is written in a new voice, from plain narration to newspaper headlines to a play script, and thoughts arrive mid-stream, unannounced. Each episode page tells you which mode you're in, whose head you're in, and which allusions are worth your time.

Read an episode, then its page here. Or take the daily companion: one short passage a day, with notes and a way to catch up, and you finish the book in about six months. If you have never opened Ulysses, begin with the beginner's guide.

Also here: characters, themes, a map of Joyce's Dublin and the Homeric parallels.

A note from the editor

Ulysses Companion is written and edited by Aidan O'Leary, a Dublin-born writer who left 25 years in tech and the daily news cycle, read the hundred greatest novels, collided with Ulysses, and has spent the years since reading, rereading, and studying Joyce, including a full year inside Finnegans Wake.

Where this guide makes a claim about the text, it's grounded in the novel itself and established scholarship, and corrected in the open when a reader catches something. More about the guide.