Hades
“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.
- Beat 01Into 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.
- Beat 02Across 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.
- Beat 03Talk 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.
- Beat 04At 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.
- Beat 05The 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.
- Beat 06Walking 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.
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.
- Scene
- The Graveyard
- Hour
- 11:00 AM
- Organ
- Heart
- Art
- Religion
- Color
- White, black
- Symbol
- Caretaker
- Technic
- Incubism
- Correspondence
- Hades