Ulysses

Character Guide

Spoiler-free — fuller detail (with spoilers, if you want them) lives in the reader's Guide tab.

Leopold Bloom (Poldy)

A Jewish-Irish advertising canvasser in his late thirties, gentle, curious, and endlessly digressive in thought, who spends June 16, 1904 wandering Dublin. He is the novel's modern-day Ulysses, an ordinary man elevated to epic stature.

Molly Bloom (Marion Tweedy)

Leopold's wife, a professional singer of Spanish-Gibraltarian background, who spends much of the day at home in bed and is expecting a visitor in the afternoon.

Stephen Dedalus (Kinch)

A brilliant, brooding young poet and schoolteacher, recently returned from Paris, still grieving and guilt-ridden over his mother's death. He serves as the novel's Telemachus figure.

Buck Mulligan (Malachi Roland St John Mulligan)

A boisterous, irreverent medical student who shares the Martello tower with Stephen and mocks his piety and grief with dark humor.

Haines

An English visitor staying at the tower who is fascinated by Irish folklore and speech, embodying a condescending outsider's view of Ireland.

Blazes Boylan

A flashy, confident concert promoter and man about town who has arranged to call on Molly Bloom in the early afternoon.

Simon Dedalus

Stephen's father, a witty but financially ruined former singer known around Dublin's pubs for his charm and decline.

Milly Bloom

Leopold and Molly's fifteen-year-old daughter, now working at a photographer's shop in Mullingar, mentioned fondly in letters and thoughts.

Paddy Dignam

A Dublin acquaintance whose recent sudden death from heart trouble prompts the funeral procession and cemetery scenes early in the book.

Martin Cunningham

A practical, sympathetic Dublin civil servant who organizes Dignam's funeral and treats Bloom with quiet respect and kindness.

Glossary

Duumvirate

A pairing of two men acting jointly; used to describe Bloom and Stephen walking and talking together as a temporary alliance.

Shoneen

Derogatory Irish slang for someone who imitates English manners and attitudes, used in a debate about reviving native Irish sports.

Ashplant

A walking stick made of ash wood; Stephen's signature prop, symbolic of his identity and, in fantasy sequences, transformed into other objects.

Nighttown

Dublin's red-light district (based on the real 'Monto' area), the setting for the surreal, hallucinatory Circe episode.

Yoni / Lingam

Sanskrit terms for the female and male sexual organs, used by the hallucinated figure Virag in an explicit erotic tirade.

Paraheliotropic

A pseudo-scientific term describing plants' growth response to artificial light, used in the mock-scientific catechism style of the Ithaca episode.

Gob

Irish slang interjection roughly meaning 'by God' or referring to the mouth, used casually in Dublin dialogue.

In exitu Israël de Egypto

Opening Latin words of Psalm 113, chanted by Bloom and Stephen as they leave the house together in the Ithaca episode.

Coactus volui

Latin phrase meaning 'I wished under compulsion,' spoken by a hallucinated figure in the Circe episode's mock-erotic monologue.

Kip

Old slang term for a brothel, part of the vocabulary surrounding the Nighttown episode.

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