The souls of Dublin.
A handful of people moving through one June day. Tap any name to open a fuller portrait, and follow the threads to their episodes and themes.
Our wandering hero. A Jewish Dubliner with a foot in every camp and full membership in none — curious, decent, quietly grieving his infant son Rudy, and patient with a wife about to be unfaithful.
Bloom is Joyce's great experiment: an ordinary man given the scale of myth. He sells newspaper ads, eats kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, helps a blind boy across a street, gets into a pub fight he didn't want, and brings a drunk young stranger home for cocoa. He is Jewish in a Catholic city, courteous to a fault, sentimental about science, and tender in ways his wife only half-suspects. Bloom is the still point the whole novel turns around — and the proof that kindness, in a hard city, can be its own kind of heroism.