Hades

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.

Schema · Linati / Gilbert

Scene

The Graveyard

Hour

11:00 AM

Organ

Heart

Art

Religion

Color

White, black

Symbol

Caretaker

Technic

Incubism

Correspondence

Hades