Episode XVI
Eumaeus
Preparatory to anything else…
1:00 AM, Cabman's shelter, near Butt Bridge. Style: Tired, relaxed prose.
Summary
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.
- 1
A long walk
Bloom dusts Stephen off and walks him slowly through the post-midnight streets toward the cabman's shelter under the Loop Line bridge. The prose is on purpose flabby, full of clichés and digressions — both men are exhausted.
- 2
The cabman's shelter
Inside, presided over by a man rumoured to be the ex-Invincible 'Skin-the-Goat,' they take coffee and a stale bun and sit among cabmen, sailors, and a streetwalker who is shooed off.
- 3
The sailor
A red-bearded sailor named W. B. Murphy spins long, dubious tales of foreign ports and shows tattoos by lamplight. Bloom listens with weary kindness and quietly doubts every word.
- 4
Bloom and Stephen, sort of, talk
Bloom shows Stephen a photograph of Molly, talks vaguely about politics, music, and his own scrape at Barney Kiernan's. Stephen replies in monosyllables. They are tired in different ways.
- 5
Out the door
Bloom helps Stephen up and they leave together for Eccles Street, walking in step at last as a Dublin street-sweeper watches them pass.
Gabler lines 16.1–1894
How Eumaeus unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Eumaeus is deliberately written badly — exhausted, cliche-ridden, endlessly qualified — because its characters are exhausted. The map follows Bloom walking Stephen to a cabman's shelter, feeding him, enduring a sailor's tall tales, and finally taking him home.
Bloom dusts Stephen off, finds no cab, and walks him through the small hours toward the cabman's shelter.
1. Bloom brushes him down
lines 1–60In fussy, overqualified prose Bloom retrieves Stephen's hat and ashplant and gets him upright.
Why it matters:The style itself is the hangover; the plot is simply care, administered slowly.
Notice:“Preparatory to anything else.” The first four words already delay the sentence.
2. Corley's touch
lines 120–250Lord John Corley intercepts them begging, and Stephen gives away money without checking how much.
Why it matters:Stephen is careless with money at precisely the point Bloom has begun guarding it for him.
3. Talk on the way
lines 250–320Bloom counsels Stephen about drink, bad company and the risk of Mulligan, receiving monosyllables in reply.
Why it matters:The father-son dynamic is entirely one-directional and entirely sincere.
4. D. B. Murphy's yarns
5. Coffee, bun, and the keeper Fitzharris
6. Politics and Parnell
7. The photograph
8. Plans for Stephen
9. Arm in arm to Eccles Street
The shape underneath
Eumaeus runs recovery → shelter → storytelling → companionship. Its tiredness is engineered: cliche, misattribution and endless subordinate clauses mimic two in the morning. Under the bad prose, the meeting the whole book has been arranging finally settles into ordinary conversation. See the Homeric parallel below for the swineherd's hut.
In modern prose
One in the morning. The chaos is over. Bloom walks the dazed, half-drunk Stephen across the city to a cabmen's shelter near the docks for a cup of bad coffee and a stale bun. The prose deliberately goes flat, exhausted, full of clichés and second-hand phrases and small grammatical mistakes, as if even the narrator is too tired to do this properly. They half-listen to a sailor at the next table who is telling tall tales about his travels and may not even be the man he claims to be. They look at a botched newspaper report of Dignam's funeral that's misspelled Bloom's name and listed him among the mourners. They talk a little, awkwardly, the way two strangers do when one of them is sobering up and the other is trying not to push. Bloom shows Stephen a slightly dated photograph of Molly, and lets him look at it longer than is strictly necessary. The chapter is the long, gentle comedown after Nighttown: nothing dramatic happens, nobody confesses anything, and yet something is being quietly negotiated — Bloom is, in his careful, slightly fussy way, offering Stephen a place to land, and Stephen is letting him.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Shelter
- Hour
- 1:00 AM
- Organ
- Nerves
- Art
- Navigation
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Sailors
- Technic
- Narrative (old)
- Correspondence
- Eumaeus
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Eumaeus.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 146: Bloom leads Stephen toward the cabman's shelterAfter the chaos of Nighttown, Bloom helps a shaky Stephen to his feet and steers him, brushing him off and talking soothingly, toward a cabman's shelter for coffee and something to eat.
- Daily Companion, Day 151: The cabman's shelter, a sailor tells his talesIn the cabman's shelter, a grizzled sailor calling himself Murphy holds court, showing off a tattooed chest and spinning tall stories of foreign ports.
- Daily Companion, Day 156: Leaving the shelter, arm in armBloom and Stephen finally leave the cabman's shelter together, walking arm in arm through the empty streets.
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Cabman's shelter, near Butt Bridge sits on Bloom's day.