Who says “Let us change the subject” in Ulysses?
“We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.” Stephen says it to Bloom in the cabman's shelter in Episode 16, around 1 am. Tired and unwilling to discuss Ireland, he ends Bloom's earnest talk about politics with a weary joke.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Episode 16, Eumaeus. Stephen, in the cabman's shelter at Butt Bridge, as Bloom talks about Ireland and work.
We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.
What it means in plain English
Bloom has been explaining his hopes for Ireland, and that everyone should work. Stephen says Ireland must be important because it belongs to him, then closes the topic.
The narrator calls it a “pertinent suggestion” and adds that Bloom, “to change the subject”, looked down: the prose of this episode is full of such stale, roundabout phrases.
Literary context
“Eumaeus” is written in a deliberately tired style, full of clichés, to match the exhaustion of its two characters late at night.
References
- Ulysses, Episode 16, “Eumaeus”
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Where is the cabman's shelter?
Near Butt Bridge in Dublin. Bloom takes Stephen there for coffee after the night in Nighttown.
Why is Eumaeus written so clumsily?
Joyce wanted the prose to feel as weary as the characters, so it is padded with clichés and roundabout phrases.
Related terms
Stephen Dedalus
The young writer who opens the novel — brilliant, grieving, and adrift. Joyce's Telemachus, the searching son.
Leopold Bloom
The central character: a kind, curious advertising canvasser whose wanderings give the novel its shape. Joyce's modern Odysseus.
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.