The threads of the day.

Bloom is a Jewish-Irish ad man who doesn't quite fit anywhere. Stephen is an artist still becoming. Molly is a woman the city only half-sees. The book lets each of them be many things at once.

Joyce wrote Ulysses from Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Inside the book Bloom moves through his own city like a polite stranger, and Stephen has just come back from one exile to plan the next.

From Mr. Deasy's lecture to the Citizen's fury in Barney Kiernan's, Joyce keeps testing what Irish identity demands — and what it does to the people who don't quite qualify.

Stephen has lost his faith and still can't stop arguing with it. Bloom watches Mass like an anthropologist. The Catholic Church is everywhere in the book's air, even when no one prays.

Molly's afternoon with Boylan is the day's gravity. Bloom's polite voyeurism, Gerty's daydream, the Circe phantasmagoria — Ulysses talks about sex like adults talk about it: messily and without apology.

Bloom keeps circling back to his dead son Rudy and his father's suicide. Molly's monologue is one long act of remembering. The present in Ulysses is always thick with the past.

Trams, ads, telegraphs, headlines, interior thought rendered in real time — Joyce uses every modern instrument he can find, and invents a few, to show what one June day in 1904 actually felt like.