Episode VI
Hades
How many! All these here once walked round Dublin.
11:00 AM, Glasnevin Cemetery. Style: Incubism.
Summary
Bloom rides in a funeral carriage to the burial of Paddy Dignam, reflecting on death, his lost son Rudy, and his father's suicide.
- 1
Into the carriage
Bloom climbs into a funeral carriage with Martin Cunningham, Jack Power, and Simon Dedalus. The four ride south-east across Dublin behind Dignam's coffin.
- 2
Across the city
Through the windows Bloom sees Stephen Dedalus on the road, then catches a glimpse of Blazes Boylan — the man he is trying all day not to think about.
- 3
Talk in the cab
The men gossip and joke, brush near the subject of suicide (Bloom's father killed himself), and Bloom keeps a polite, careful silence.
- 4
At Glasnevin
They reach Prospect Cemetery. The service is brief. Bloom hangs at the edge of the group, observing rituals he finds half-comforting and half-absurd, thinking about Rudy, his infant son, dead at eleven days.
- 5
The man in the mackintosh
A stranger in a mackintosh appears at the grave — unnamed, unaccounted for — and the chapter logs him as a small mystery that will quietly recur all day.
- 6
Walking out
Bloom leaves with the others. He thinks about how the dead are talked over, forgotten, fed to the soil, and walks back into the living city.
Gabler lines 6.1–1033
How Hades unfolds, scene by scene
This isn't another summary — it's a map. Hades carries Bloom by carriage across the whole city to Paddy Dignam's funeral, and the journey is a descent: four men in a cab, four rivers, a chapel, a grave. Watch how Bloom is included in the party and excluded from it at the same time. Use it to find your place in the text and see why each scene is there.
Bloom rides with Simon Dedalus, Martin Cunningham and Jack Power. The talk is companionable and cruel by turns, and the city passes the window like a map of the dead.
1. Getting in
lines 1–80The mourners climb into the carriage at Dignam's house in Sandymount; Bloom takes the last seat and the cortege moves off.
Why it matters:Seating, precedence and small talk immediately establish Bloom's position — present, tolerated, never quite of the group.
Notice:Bloom sits on a crumb and thinks about the dead man's furniture. His attention is always material and always compassionate.
2. Stephen at the window
lines 81–200Bloom spots Stephen Dedalus walking, and tells Simon, who launches into a tirade against Mulligan and his son's company.
Why it matters:The book's two protagonists come within sight of each other for the first time, with a father's anger in between.
Notice:Bloom silently thinks of his own dead son Rudy while Simon rages about a living one. Joyce lets the contrast do the work.
3. Boylan on the street
lines 201–300The others hail Blazes Boylan passing by; Bloom examines his own fingernails until the moment passes.
Why it matters:The rival appears and Bloom's response is a small physical evasion — the day's betrayal made visible in a gesture.
Notice:“Is there anything more in him that they she sees?” — the broken syntax is jealousy interrupting his own sentence.
4. The four rivers and the talk of suicide
5. The mortuary chapel
6. The walk to the grave
7. The lowering, and the man in the macintosh
8. Caretaker Kelleher and the jokes
9. The rat and the thought of decay
10. “Warm fullblooded life”
The shape underneath
Read straight through, Hades moves through procession → crossing → rite → burial → return. Bloom descends with the mourners, is wounded twice on the way (Boylan at the window, suicide in the carriage), sees his dead father and son without saying a word about either, and walks out choosing “warm fullblooded life.” It is the most conventionally structured episode of the morning and the most quietly heroic. See the Homeric parallel below for how Glasnevin answers Homer's land of the dead.
In modern prose
Eleven in the morning. Bloom shares a funeral carriage out to Glasnevin Cemetery with three other men, including Stephen's father Simon Dedalus — charming, broke, a widower drinking himself into ruin. They're burying their friend Paddy Dignam, who has drunk himself to death and left a wife and kids with nothing. The men in the carriage chat about racing and gossip; one of them makes a casually anti-Semitic remark, not realising or not caring that Bloom is the Jew in question. Bloom absorbs it, says nothing, looks out of the window. The chapter is the book's long, honest look at death. Bloom thinks about his father, who took an overdose in a hotel room in Ennis, and about his baby son Rudy, who died at eleven days old and after whom he and Molly have not had full sex in eleven years — a fact the book will keep circling back to. He watches the gravediggers, the rats, the practical machinery of the cemetery, and refuses to be morbid about it: the dead are dead, the living have to eat. He leaves quietly grateful, walks back toward the noise of the city, and the chapter's real subject becomes clear — it's about the small, unshowy courage of carrying private grief while other people are being rude to you in a carriage.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Graveyard
- Hour
- 11:00 AM
- Organ
- Heart
- Art
- Religion
- Colour
- White, black
- Symbol
- Caretaker
- Technic
- Incubism
- Correspondence
- Hades
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Hades.
- 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 28: Into the funeral carriage with Dignam's mournersBloom climbs into a carriage with three other men — Simon Dedalus (Stephen's father), Martin Cunningham, and Jack Power — for the long ride across Dublin to bury Paddy Dignam.
- Daily Companion, Day 32: Bloom's mind turns to his father's deathAs the coach rattles past familiar landmarks, Bloom's thoughts slip to his father, Rudolph Virag, who took his own life years before.
- Daily Companion, Day 36: Leaving the cemetery: Menton's snubWalking out, Bloom points out helpfully to John Henry Menton that his hat is dinted.
- 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 Glasnevin Cemetery sits on Bloom's day.