Lestrygonians
“Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butterscotch.”
Hungry Bloom wanders past food shops and pubs, recoils at a brutal lunchtime crowd, and settles for a quiet cheese sandwich at Davy Byrne's.
- Beat 01Throwaway
On O'Connell Bridge a young evangelist hands Bloom a tract; he reads the word 'Blood of the Lamb,' crumples it, and tosses it to the gulls.
- Beat 02Mrs. Breen
He bumps into Josie Breen, an old flame now married to an unwell man obsessed with an anonymous postcard reading 'U. p: up.' They part politely.
- Beat 03Burton restaurant
Hungry, Bloom looks in at the Burton and is appalled by the swilling, snorting crowd of male eaters. He backs out.
- Beat 04Davy Byrne's
He retreats to Davy Byrne's 'moral pub' and orders a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich, sitting in private and remembering an early afternoon on Howth with Molly years ago.
- Beat 05Helping the blind stripling
Walking away, he sees a blind young piano-tuner trying to cross the road and quietly helps him over. Then he spots Boylan on the street and ducks into the nearby National Museum to avoid him.
One in the afternoon and Bloom is hungry. He walks across the centre of town looking for somewhere to eat, and because he's hungry, everything he sees turns into food: pigeons become a meal, schoolchildren become animals, advertising hoardings become menus. Underneath the hunger is a deeper one — he keeps thinking about Molly, about the early days when they were happy, about a picnic on the Hill of Howth where she fed him a piece of seed-cake from her own mouth, about how four o'clock is getting closer. He looks into one restaurant, recoils at the sight of men shovelling food like beasts, and goes instead to Davy Byrne's pub for a cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy — a small, civilised meal eaten slowly. He has one of those quiet middle-aged thoughts about how love and food and bodies are all tangled up, and how the world is held together by people being briefly kind to each other. On his way out he helps a young blind man across the street, with real care. Then he sees Boylan on the pavement ahead, the very man, and ducks into a museum to hide. The chapter is about appetite in every sense, and about a man being decent in a city that mostly isn't.
- Scene
- The Lunch
- Hour
- 1:00 PM
- Organ
- Esophagus
- Art
- Architecture
- Color
- —
- Symbol
- Constables
- Technic
- Peristaltic
- Correspondence
- Lestrygonians