Read alongside the book, or just on its own. Each entry tells you where you are, what time it is, what Joyce is doing on the page, and what actually happens — without spoiling the pleasure.
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…”
Stephen Dedalus opens the day in a seaside tower, mocked by his roommate Buck Mulligan and unsettled by the recent death of his mother. He decides not to return that night.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Stephen teaches a dull history lesson, helps a slow student with sums, and collects his wages from the headmaster Mr. Deasy, who lectures him on Jews and money.
“Ineluctable modality of the visible.”
Stephen walks the beach, lost in dense philosophical thought about perception, memory, and shape-shifting. A famously interior chapter.
“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”
Leopold Bloom arrives. He cooks a kidney for breakfast, feeds the cat, brings Molly her post — including a letter from Blazes Boylan — and quietly senses what's coming.
“Bath. Cleanse from drugs of the day.”
Bloom drifts through the city, picks up a flirtatious letter under a false name, watches Mass, and ends in the warm narcotic of a public bath.
“How many! All these here once walked round Dublin.”
Bloom rides in a funeral carriage to the burial of Paddy Dignam, reflecting on death, his lost son Rudy, and his father's suicide.
“In the heart of the Hibernian metropolis.”
A chapter told in newspaper headlines. Bloom tries to place an ad while editors, lawyers, and Stephen swap rhetoric, gossip, and jokes.
“Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butterscotch.”
Hungry Bloom wanders past food shops and pubs, recoils at a brutal lunchtime crowd, and settles for a quiet cheese sandwich at Davy Byrne's.
“He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather.”
Stephen performs a dazzling, half-serious theory of Hamlet to a circle of Dublin literati. Bloom passes through the library on his own errand.
“Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields…”
Nineteen short scenes track minor and major characters crossing the city at the same hour, stitched together by glimpses of a viceregal procession.
“Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.”
A chapter written like music. Bloom eats dinner alone as barmaids flirt and Simon Dedalus sings, while Boylan rides off to meet Molly.
“I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P.”
An unnamed cynic narrates Bloom's run-in with a violent nationalist known as the Citizen, interrupted by grand parodies. It ends with a thrown biscuit tin.
“The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.”
Gerty MacDowell daydreams in the style of cheap romance novels while Bloom watches from a distance. Fireworks; a charged, private moment.
“Deshil Holles Eamus.”
Bloom visits a friend in labour. Medical students drink upstairs; the prose grows from Anglo-Saxon to modern slang, mirroring the development of a child.
“(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown…)”
Bloom follows a drunk Stephen into the red-light district. A hallucinatory play unfolds: shame, transformation, ghosts, and finally a quiet rescue.
“Preparatory to anything else…”
Exhausted, Bloom takes Stephen for coffee in a late-night shelter. The tired prose drifts as the two finally talk, sort of, beside a dubious sailor.
“What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”
Bloom brings Stephen home. The chapter answers everything in cold catechism — kettles, water, urination under the stars — before Bloom finally goes to bed.
“Yes because he never did a thing like that before…”
Molly Bloom's unpunctuated nocturne. Eight long sentences carrying memory, lovers, irritation, tenderness, and a final, famous, affirming Yes.