Episode XVII
Ithaca
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
2:00 AM, 7 Eccles Street. Style: Impersonal catechism.
Summary
Bloom brings Stephen home. The chapter answers everything in cold catechism — kettles, water, urination under the stars — before Bloom finally goes to bed.
- 1
Question and answer
The whole chapter is written as a cold, mock-scientific question-and-answer, as if a textbook were being asked everything that happens between the two men.
- 2
Getting in
Bloom forgets his key, climbs over the railings of 7 Eccles Street, drops into the area, and lets Stephen in by the front door. He boils water and makes them cocoa.
- 3
Conversation
They talk — about music, about being Jewish, about Ireland, about themselves. They discover overlaps in their lives and discover, with equal calm, where they don't fit.
- 4
Under the stars
Bloom shows Stephen out the back door. The two stand in the garden, look up at 'the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,' and urinate side by side. Stephen leaves into the small hours.
- 5
An inventory of a life
Alone, Bloom takes a long inventory of the kitchen, of his desk drawer, of his marriage, of the day. He notes evidence of Boylan in the bedroom and decides on a kind of equanimity.
- 6
Into bed
He gets into bed feet-to-head beside Molly, kisses 'the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump,' answers her questions briefly about his day, and falls asleep. The chapter ends with a great black dot.
Gabler lines 17.1–2332
How Ithaca unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Ithaca is written as a catechism: hundreds of impersonal questions answered with scientific, legal and arithmetical precision. The map follows the homecoming through its three practical stages — getting in, sitting together, and going to bed.
Bloom and Stephen walk to 7 Eccles Street, Bloom finds himself keyless, climbs down into the area, and lets them both in.
1. The walk and the parallel courses
lines 1–120The catechism lists the routes, topics and temperaments of the two walkers with legal exactness.
Why it matters:The style refuses all sentiment, so any warmth the reader feels has to come from the facts themselves.
Notice:The questions never ask how anyone feels. They ask distances, volumes and dates.
2. The keyless citizen
lines 70–130Bloom discovers he left his key in his other trousers, lowers himself over the railings, and enters through the scullery.
Why it matters:The householder gets into his own home by climbing in — the episode's quiet joke about belonging.
Compared with Homer · Odysseus reclaims his hall
Odysseus enters his own house disguised, then slaughters the suitors with the bow only he can string. Bloom enters by dropping over the area railings, finds the furniture rearranged, and kills nobody. His revenge on Boylan is a paragraph of reasoning that ends in equanimity, which the catechism records as plainly as a tide table.
3. The water hymn
lines 160–280Bloom draws water from the tap and the text delivers a page-long celebration of water's properties, sources and virtues.
Why it matters:The most famous passage in the episode is a lyric hidden inside a plumbing answer.
4. The cocoa
5. Hebrew and Irish
6. The ballad and the departure
7. The budget, the drawer, the ambitions
8. The bed, and the series of suitors
9. Where?
The shape underneath
Ithaca runs approach → entry → communion → departure → reckoning → sleep. Joyce called it his favourite episode and the book's true ending. The cold catechetical style is the point: measured against the universe, the events of the day are trivial, and they are also everything. See the Homeric parallel below for the homecoming behind it.
In modern prose
Two in the morning. Bloom brings Stephen home to 7 Eccles Street. The whole chapter is written as a deadpan series of questions and answers, like a school catechism or a science textbook or a Wikipedia article being compiled in real time — and that flat, factual surface is exactly the point. Underneath it, this is the most emotionally loaded chapter in the book. We learn precisely how Bloom boils the water and makes them cocoa; the exact contents of his bookshelf, his kitchen drawer, his locked box of personal papers; his thoughts on water, on the universe, on the Jewish people, on emigration, on his daughter, on his marriage, on the eleven years since he and Molly had full sex, on the men he believes she has slept with (including Boylan, calmly listed). Bloom offers Stephen a bed for the night; Stephen, just as politely, declines, and walks off into the dark. The two of them stand together in the back garden first, look up at the stars, and pee. Then Bloom locks up the house, eats a small slice of seed-cake, climbs into bed beside the sleeping Molly, kisses her bottom, asks her for breakfast in bed, and curls up to sleep head-to-foot beside her — at peace, somehow, with everything that happened today. The flat scientific style is a kind of armour: it lets the book look directly at things that would burn it to look at sentimentally.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The House
- Hour
- 2:00 AM
- Organ
- Skeleton
- Art
- Science
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Comets
- Technic
- Catechism (impersonal)
- Correspondence
- Ithaca
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Ithaca.
- 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 157: The chapter opens as catechismThe style changes completely: the story is now told as a series of blunt questions and equally exact answers, like a science textbook or a catechism.
- Daily Companion, Day 163: Under the stars in the gardenBloom and Stephen step out into the small back garden and, side by side, urinate under the night sky while looking up at the stars.
- Daily Companion, Day 168: Bed, and the final questionBloom finally climbs into bed beside Molly, but the wrong way round, feet where his head usually rests, sensing signs of Boylan's visit without confronting them.
- 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 7 Eccles Street sits on Bloom's day.