Episode 6 of Ulysses turns Homer's land of shades into a hired carriage to Glasnevin, where Bloom mourns Paddy Dignam in public and his own father and son in silence.
"Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. They are not going to get me this innings."
In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus sails to the edge of the world, digs a pit, pours libations of milk, honey, wine and blood, and summons the dead. He speaks with his comrade, with the prophet Tiresias, and — most painfully — with his mother Anticleia, who died of grief in his absence.
Joyce moves the underworld to north Dublin. Bloom rides in a funeral carriage to Glasnevin Cemetery for the burial of Paddy Dignam. Around him, the official rite of mourning unfolds. Inside him, two unburied losses — his father, a suicide; his infant son — rise to be addressed in silence.
The epic descent is rewritten as the modern grief one carries into other people's funerals.
On Circe's instruction, Odysseus sails to the edge of Ocean, where the cimmerian people live in perpetual twilight. There he digs a pit, pours libations and sacrifices black sheep so that the dead may rise and drink.
He speaks first with Elpenor, his unburied crewman, then with Tiresias the prophet, who tells him of the journey home and the long suffering ahead. Then his mother's shade comes forward — and three times he reaches to embrace her, and three times she slips through his arms 'like a shadow or a dream'.
Book 11 is the Odyssey's most tender chapter: the hero confronts what death actually is — the loss of touch, of speech, of the warm body of the beloved.
Odysseus crosses Ocean and lands at the dim grove of Persephone. Bloom rides a hired carriage from Sandymount across the city to Prospect Cemetery, passing the four civic monuments of Dublin like landmarks on the river Styx. The mythic descent becomes a mundane northward drive.
The wheels rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook rattling in the doorframes.
Hades has Joyce's densest Homeric mapping in the early book: every mourner, every gate, every monument has an underworld counterpart.
| Ulysses | Odyssey counterpart | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Leopold Bloom | Odysseus in Hades | The living visitor among the dead |
| Paddy Dignam | Elpenor (the recent, unburied dead) | The freshly dead whose body must be put away |
| Rudolph Bloom (father) | Anticleia (Odysseus's mother) | The unbidden parental shade |
| Rudy Bloom (infant son) | Unfulfilled future / the unborn | Joyce's private addition: the child who never lived to die |
| The man in the macintosh | Tiresias | The mysterious figure at the threshold, who refuses to be read |
| John O'Connell, caretaker | Charon / Hades's officials | The professional gatekeeper of the dead |
| Glasnevin Cemetery | Erebus / Persephone's grove | The geography of the underworld, in north Dublin |
Scene: The Graveyard. Art: Religion. Symbol: the caretaker.
Organ: heart. Technique: Incubism. Colour: white / black.
Odysseus → Bloom. Anticleia → Rudolph & Rudy. Tiresias → M'Intosh.
Public ritual vs. private grief — the chapter's twin engines.
Bloom's father (lost) and son (never grown) — the absent line.
Corpses, coffins, gas, decomposition — Joyce's unflinching realism.
The carriage as Dublin in miniature; Bloom listens, says nothing.
Each landmark on the route is a private commemorative trigger.
Hearses, prices, weather — death framed by errands.
'They are not going to get me this innings.' A choice for life.
Father Coffey, the wafer-Latin, the inadequacy of the rite.
M'Intosh: the figure who appears and is never explained.
Whip-rounds, the widow's pension, who pays for the dead.
"Then there gathered from out of Erebus the spirits of those who are dead, brides and unwedded youths and toil-worn old men, and tender maidens with hearts yet new to sorrow."
Odyssey, Book XI (public domain trans.)
"How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we."
Ulysses, Episode 6
Homer's catalogue of shades becomes Joyce's quiet count of a Dublin cemetery. The Nekyia's poetic accumulation is rewritten as a single Bloomian thought — democratic, ironic, tender.
"Then came the spirit of my dead mother, Anticleia, daughter of great-hearted Autolycus, whom I had left alive when I departed for sacred Ilios. At the sight of her I wept, and my heart was filled with pity."
Odyssey, Book XI
"If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit."
Ulysses, Episode 6
Joyce inverts Homer's mother-meeting: instead of the parent dead, the child dead — and instead of a real shade, an unrealised future. The Homeric grief of a son becomes the modern grief of a father.
"Then I said to her: 'Mother, why dost thou not abide me when I would clasp thee, that even in Hades we two may cast our arms each about the other?'"
Odyssey, Book XI
"Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings."
Ulysses, Episode 6
Where Odysseus reaches forward and embraces emptiness, Bloom turns his back on the cemetery and chooses the warm and the present. Joyce reverses Homer's gesture: the modern hero saves himself by walking out.
The hero sails to the edge of the world, performs blood-rites, and converses face to face with the named dead. The underworld is elsewhere.
The hero takes a carriage up the Liffey, past the canal, to a municipal cemetery, and converses with the dead in his head. The underworld is on the bus route.
The descent is no longer geographical — it is the daily, civic weight of carrying one's dead through a working morning.
Hades is where readers first learn what Bloom carries — his dead son, his suicide father — and what kind of attention he pays to other people's grief. The chapter is the moral hinge of the book.
It is also where the Homeric correspondence reaches its first full elaboration: the carriage as the boat to Hades, the caretaker as Charon, the strange mourner as Tiresias. After this chapter the parallels become a permanent grammar underneath the prose.
Bloom enters Hades a kind man. He leaves it a quietly heroic one.
Joyce maps Episode 6 onto Book 11 of the Odyssey — the Nekyia, Odysseus's descent to the land of the dead. The chapter follows Bloom in a carriage to Paddy Dignam's funeral and through the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery. Joyce calls it 'Hades' because Bloom literally and figuratively goes down among the dead.