Episode VIII
Lestrygonians
Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butterscotch.
1:00 PM, Around Grafton Street. Style: Peristaltic prose.
Summary
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.
- 1
Throwaway
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.
- 2
Mrs. 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.
- 3
Burton restaurant
Hungry, Bloom looks in at the Burton and is appalled by the swilling, snorting crowd of male eaters. He backs out.
- 4
Davy 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.
- 5
Helping 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.
Gabler lines 8.1–1193
How Lestrygonians unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Lestrygonians is the hunger episode: Bloom crosses the city at one in the afternoon and everything he sees is food, digestion or appetite. The map follows the hunger from a thrown handbill to a vegetarian lunch to a near-collision he flees.
Bloom walks from O'Connell Bridge toward Grafton Street, thinking about food, charity, birth and the dead.
1. Elijah is coming
lines 1–100Bloom takes a throwaway handbill announcing Elijah's coming and drops it into the Liffey, where it starts its long drift through the book.
Why it matters:The throwaway will resurface twice more and eventually name a horse — the novel's neatest running joke.
2. Mrs Breen and Mrs Purefoy
lines 200–390Bloom meets Josie Breen, hears about her husband's U.P. postcard, and learns Mina Purefoy has been three days in labour.
Why it matters:Two versions of suffering — a marriage gone strange and a body in prolonged labour — stay with Bloom all day.
Notice:Bloom's sympathy is practical: he asks how long, and what the nurses are doing.
3. The gulls and the cannibal thoughts
lines 74–180Bloom feeds Banbury cakes to the gulls and drifts into what the city eats and what eats the city.
Why it matters:The episode's cannibal theme enters through kindness to birds, which is exactly how Bloom's mind works.
4. The Burton: men eating
5. Gorgonzola and burgundy
6. Howth remembered
7. The blind stripling
8. The statues at the museum
9. Boylan on the street
The shape underneath
Lestrygonians runs appetite → revulsion → moderation → memory → flight. Its prose is peristaltic, pushing thought along in slow rhythmic waves, and nearly every image is something being consumed. Bloom passes the episode's tests by refusing to gorge and by helping a stranger, then fails its last one by hiding. See the Homeric parallel below for how the cannibal island becomes a Dublin lunch hour.
In modern prose
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.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Lunch
- Hour
- 1:00 PM
- Organ
- Esophagus
- Art
- Architecture
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Constables
- Technic
- Peristaltic
- Correspondence
- Lestrygonians
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Lestrygonians.
- 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 47: Bloom walks through Dublin at lunchtime, thinking about foodHungry, Bloom strolls through the city near lunchtime, and his thoughts drift constantly to food — what people eat, what he might eat, the mechanics of hunger itself.
- Daily Companion, Day 52: Mrs Breen and the news of Mina Purefoy's labourLeaving the pub, Bloom runs into Mrs Breen, an old acquaintance now married to a man slipping into eccentric paranoia.
- Daily Companion, Day 56: Safely inside the museum gateBloom slips through the museum gate just in time, pretending to check his pockets for something, and the chapter ends on his relief at having escaped the encounter, at least for now.
- 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 Around Grafton Street sits on Bloom's day.