What happens at Glasnevin Cemetery in Ulysses?
Glasnevin is Dublin's great Catholic cemetery, where Paddy Dignam is buried in Episode 6. Bloom watches the burial, thinks about death with frank curiosity, and notices a stranger in a macintosh. Parnell and O'Connell are buried there too.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 6, Hades. Bloom, leaving the graveside and turning back towards life.
Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you.
What it means in plain English
Bloom's thoughts at the graveside are practical: how the dead decay, how many are buried each day, how a telephone in the coffin might help.
Then he turns away from the dead: “Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings.”
Literary context
In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the land of the dead to speak with ghosts.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 6, “Hades”
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Can you visit Glasnevin?
Yes. It has a museum and tours.
Related terms
Paddy Dignam
Paddy Dignam is the Dublin man whose funeral Bloom attends at Glasnevin Cemetery in Episode 6. He died suddenly of a stroke, helped by drink, leaving a widow and five children. Bloom spends part of the day helping to collect insurance money for the family.
The man in the macintosh
The man in the macintosh is an unnamed stranger in a raincoat whom Bloom notices at Paddy Dignam's funeral in "Hades" (Episode 6). He turns up again several times during the day. Joyce never reveals who he is, and he is one of the book's most famous unsolved puzzles.
Parnell
Charles Stewart Parnell led the Irish fight for Home Rule until 1890, when his affair with Katharine O'Shea was exposed and the Church and his party turned on him. He died in 1891. In Ulysses, he is everywhere: a lost leader, a betrayed man, and a symbol of Ireland's divisions.