What does “parallax” mean in Ulysses?
Parallax is the way an object seems to shift position when seen from two different places. Bloom remembers the word from a popular astronomy book in Episode 8 and admits he never understood it. It suits a novel that shows Dublin from many viewpoints.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Several episodes. Bloom, walking past the Ballast Office clock and thinking about time balls and astronomy.
Parallax. I never exactly understood.
What it means in plain English
Astronomers use parallax to measure the distance to stars: look at a star from two points of Earth's orbit and it seems to move a little.
In the same breath Bloom remembers Molly's mangling of “metempsychosis” as “met him pike hoses”: two difficult words, two misunderstandings.
Literary context
Bloom's book is Sir Robert Ball's “The Story of the Heavens” (1885), which he owns.
References
- Ulysses, Episodes 8, 14 and 15
- Sir Robert Ball, The Story of the Heavens (1885)
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Does parallax appear again?
Yes, in Oxen of the Sun and Circe, where it becomes almost a character.
Related terms
Met him pike hoses (metempsychosis)
"Met him pike hoses" is Molly Bloom's mangled version of "metempsychosis", a Greek word for the transmigration of souls: the belief that a soul is reborn in another body after death. She asks Bloom what it means in "Calypso" (Episode 4), and the phrase becomes a running joke and a key idea.
“The heaventree of stars”
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit” is the sight Bloom and Stephen see when they step into the garden of 7 Eccles Street in Episode 17. A rare burst of poetry in a chapter written as dry questions and answers, it pictures the night sky as a tree of fruit.
Leopold Bloom
The central character: a kind, curious advertising canvasser whose wanderings give the novel its shape. Joyce's modern Odysseus.