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
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan…”
Stephen Dedalus opens the day in a seaside tower, mocked by his roommate Buck Mulligan and unsettled by the recent death of his mother. He decides not to return that night.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.”
A chapter written like music. Bloom eats dinner alone as barmaids flirt and Simon Dedalus sings, while Boylan rides off to meet Molly.
“(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.
“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.