A complete chapter-by-chapter summary of James Joyce's Ulysses, with all 18 episodes explained. Each card gives you the basics: the Dublin location, the time of day, the Homeric parallel, a plain-English summary of what happens, and the key themes to listen for. Read them in order, or dip in wherever you are in the book.
10 of 18 episodes
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Stephen teaches a dull history lesson, helps a slow student with sums, and collects his wages from the headmaster Mr. Deasy, who lectures him on Jews and money.
“Ineluctable modality of the visible.”
Stephen walks the beach, lost in dense philosophical thought about perception, memory, and shape-shifting. A famously interior chapter.
“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”
Leopold Bloom arrives. He cooks a kidney for breakfast, feeds the cat, brings Molly her post — including a letter from Blazes Boylan — and quietly senses what's coming.
“In the heart of the Hibernian metropolis.”
A chapter told in newspaper headlines. Bloom tries to place an ad while editors, lawyers, and Stephen swap rhetoric, gossip, and jokes.
“He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather.”
Stephen performs a dazzling, half-serious theory of Hamlet to a circle of Dublin literati. Bloom passes through the library on his own errand.
“I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P.”
An unnamed cynic narrates Bloom's run-in with a violent nationalist known as the Citizen, interrupted by grand parodies. It ends with a thrown biscuit tin.
“(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown…)”
Bloom follows a drunk Stephen into the red-light district. A hallucinatory play unfolds: shame, transformation, ghosts, and finally a quiet rescue.
“Preparatory to anything else…”
Exhausted, Bloom takes Stephen for coffee in a late-night shelter. The tired prose drifts as the two finally talk, sort of, beside a dubious sailor.
“What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”
Bloom brings Stephen home. The chapter answers everything in cold catechism — kettles, water, urination under the stars — before Bloom finally goes to bed.
“Yes because he never did a thing like that before…”
Molly Bloom's unpunctuated nocturne. Eight long sentences carrying memory, lovers, irritation, tenderness, and a final, famous, affirming Yes.