Eumaeus

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.

Schema · Linati / Gilbert

Scene

The Shelter

Hour

1:00 AM

Organ

Nerves

Art

Navigation

Color

—

Symbol

Sailors

Technic

Narrative (old)

Correspondence

Eumaeus