One obvious way of thinking about a book is not the plot, narrative or style, but slicing it up by characters and actions. This is especially handy for ‘Ulysses’ in which a cast of over 200 named characters weave in and out of the narrative as they weave their way around Dublin. You could get cute and say that many phrases and individual key words recur like characters, weaving in and out of the text to create complicated resonances and motifs, which is true, but listing them would take a book. Just creating this cast list deepened my own understanding of the characters and their significance.

The list is in order of first appearance – I wasn’t sure whether to put it into alphabetical order but Wikipedia already has an alphabetical list, if you want one:

• List of Ulysses characters (Wikipedia article)

I omitted chapter 15, ‘Circe’, because it is a beast unto itself, with over 100 characters with some of them of questionable nature (for example the various inanimate objects who have active or speaking parts) and would make this list unmanageably long. You can read my Circe review with its cast list, separately.

Chapter numbers and names

Here’s a reminder of the 18 chapters and their Homeric titles i.e. the episodes from Homer’s Odyssey which they are based on or reference. (Always worth emphasising that these titles don’t actually appear in any edition of ‘Ulysses’ where the chapters are just given as plain numbers; they are the names given by Joyce to early promoters of his book and which have been used by scholars and fans ever since they became known in the 1930s.)

Part 1. Telemachiad

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10. Wandering Rocks
11. Sirens
12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

Cast

Numbers in brackets refer to chapters the characters appear in. They’re as complete as I could make them but probably not definitive.

1. Telemachus: at the Martello Tower

Stephen Dedalus (1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17) aged 22, hyper-intelligent, extremely well-read, bookish young man with literary ambitions – described as ‘a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat’, mourning his recently dead mother. Called back from a brief sojourn in Paris by his father’s telegram telling him his mother is dying, Stephen caused scandal by refusing to kneel and pray at her bedside. Earns a bit teaching at Deasy’s school. In the National Library propounds his Shakespeare theory to sceptical traditionalists who aren’t impressed (10). Depressed, he appears to spend the rest of the day drinking, reappearing in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode, making drunken smart remarks in the gang of drunk medical students when sober Bloom arrives. He is mortified that it is superficial Buck Mulligan who gets invited to the important literary soiree of George Moore and not the much more clever him. When the party in the maternity hospital breaks up, Stephen staggers off to the red light district where he encounters Bloom again, who rescues him from a confrontation with a British soldier and takes him home for cocoa and a chat.

On this reading of ‘Ulysses’ I realised that Stephen, for all his smarts, is a frustrated loser, stymied at every turn. By the time we get to the later chapters, his highfalutin quoting of Aquinas or whoever which felt impressive in the opening chapters, has come to seem a pathetic compensation for his failure.

I don’t feel sorry for Stephen, he’s had plenty of advantages to his start in life; I feel sorry for his impoverished younger brothers and sisters. He encounters one in chapter 10, Wandering Rocks, Dilly (Delia) Dedalus, at a bookseller’s cart, where Dilly has bought a French primer. He feels pity for her pathetic attempts to educate herself and he has his wages in his pocket to help her… but he doesn’t; he prefers to spend all his wages on alcohol and then on prostitutes. So no sympathy for Stephen.

Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, recently dead. Mulligan castigates him for refusing to kneel and pray by her bedside as she was dying, a refusal that leaves him plagued by guilt throughout the novel, climaxing in the Circe chapter where he hallucinates her reproaching him. Her recent death explains why for the whole of Bloomsday Stephen is dressed in mourning. For me the often-overlooked fact is that his poor mother had 13 pregnancies, from which there are nine surviving children.

Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan (1, 10, 13) – plump, witty young medical student who has rented a Martello tower to live in and is letting Stephen rent a room. Mockingly dismissive of Stephen’s literary pretensions, he crops up again in the Scylla and Charybdis in the National Library taking the mickey out of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory. Stephen is repelled by his flashy cynicism. Hugh Kenner points out he is given no interior monologue i.e. he has no insides. Yet again he appears mid-way through an episode in the maternity hospital in Oxen of the Sun, yet again upstaging Stephen, before disappearing off to catch the last train out to the tower at Sandymount.

Haines (1) – Englishman temporarily staying at the Martello tower. Prone to nightmares which have kept Stephen up all night and put him in a grumpy mood. Well-meaning but imperceptive upper-class Englishman who typifies the colonial attitudes Stephen resents.

The old milk woman (1) – appears in ‘Telemachus’ when Haines tries to speak Irish to her which she can’t understand, asking if he’s speaking French: so, the comedy of a British Gaelic revivalist trying to use a half-dead language that the genuine locals don’t speak any more. For context, see:

• The Women of Ulysses: Mother Grogan and the Milk Woman

2. Nestor: at Clifton Boys’ School, Dalkey

Cyril Sargent (2) – at Clifton Boys School, Stephen gives a history lesson then keeps this boy, Sargent, back after class to help him with sums, prompting the simple comment ‘Futility’. Stephen reflects that nonetheless his mother loves him, that a mother’s love is the one consistency in life, and then feels racked with guilt at hurting his dying mother.

Garrett Deasy (2) – pompous antisemitic Unionist headmaster of the (unnamed) school in Dalkey where Stephen is teaching in ‘Nestor’. As a ‘West Briton’ (remember, this was the insult levelled at Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’) he represents unionist, Protestant and capitalist views, and so is a foil to Stephen’s nationalist, Catholic, artistic temperament. We see him a) paying Stephen his wages (£3 12s 0d) and b) finishing writing and then handing to Stephen a letter regarding foot-and-mouth disease which he wants him to take to the offices of the Evening Telegraph (and which we see Stephen deliver in chapter 7, Aeolus, and facetiously discussed by the drunken crew in chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun).

4. Calypso: at the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, 7 Eccles Road

Leopold Bloom (4 and onwards) – aged 38. Used to work for Wisdom Hely’s, where he was a traveller for blottingpaper, now he is a freelancer canvasser for adverts i.e. advises clients about design and then tries to place them in newspapers. In Nosy Flynn’s view ‘He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He’s been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom has his good points.’

Crucial to understanding the entire book is that Bloom knows his wife, Molly, is going to have sex with her concert impresario Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boyle, who’s popping round to her house around 4pm. All day long Bloom is haunted by this knowledge and from time to time sees Boyle in the street (signalled in the text by Boyle’s trademark straw hat).

Bloom himself is fleetingly seen in passing by other characters as ‘A darkbacked figure’. According to Lenehan ‘He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom’. According to the narrator of Cyclops who sees him hesitate about taking a cigar, ‘he’s a prudent member and no mistake’ and, later, as he gets impatient with Bloom’s endless talk, describes him ‘with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about’. He is similarly cautious in Oxen of the Sun where he accepts a drink from the other roisterers but then quietly pours it into his neighbour’s glass, thus proving the only respectful man among them.

As the book proceeds we come to realise Bloom is quite highly sexed and has numerous sexual fantasies. In the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter he apparently masturbates to the sight of a young childminder displaying her stockinged legs and knickers (although there is apparently scholarly debate about whether this actually happens or is just Bloom’s fantasy). And then in the extended ‘Circe’ chapter, among other transformations, Bloom is humiliated and turned into a woman for the sadistic pleasure of hallucinated prostitutes. This confirms the sense that he is actively conspiring in his own cuckolding (why doesn’t he confront Molly about it? turn up at the house at the appointed time, to prevent it?) because he gets a kick from sexual humiliation (see his correspondence with Martha, below).

Molly Bloom (4 and onwards) – née Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and an unnamed mother from Gibraltar. She is a soprano singer, ‘Dublin’s prime favourite’ and going on a concert tour arranged by the producer Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan who has a date to come round her house that afternoon and have sex with her. Molly is plump. Leopold ‘looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder’. John Henry Menton says ‘a good armful she was’. Lenehan describes sharing a taxi ride with her and says ‘She has a fine pair, God bless her.’ The lowlife narrator of chapter 12 calls her a ‘fat heap’. In the spoof Celtic Revival style she is described as ‘The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.’ Molly reads popular romances and Bloom spends some time at a second-hand stall looking for new ones to buy her. Her first appearance is lazing while Leopold beings her breakfast in bed. The novel famously ends with a long chapter devoted entirely to her freeflowing stream-of-consciousness thoughts as she falls asleep.

Milly Bloom (4) – Leopold and Molly’s 15-year-old daughter, recently left home to work as a photographer’s assistant in Mullingar, where she is seeing a young man named Alec Bannon. This Bannon turns up in Oxen of the Sun.

Rudy Bloom (4 and thereafter) – the infant son of Leopold and Molly Bloom who died at just 11 days old, about a decade before the events of Ulysses. As the couple’s only son, his death haunts Leopold, triggering recurring feelings of loss, guilt and regret at the lack of an heir.

Martha (4) – married woman who Bloom is having an ‘affair’ with via post, under the assumed name of Henry Flower. He’s never actually met her, he just enjoys exchanging risqué correspondence in which she calls him her naughty boy and threatens to spank him, more evidence of Bloom’s wish to be sexually humiliated.

Rudolph Virág (4) – Leopold’s father, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who converted to Protestantism, which explains why despite being nominally Jewish Bloom has very few thoughts about Jewish history, theology, traditions or practices. What he does ruminate on is the fact that Rudolph committed suicide by taking poison. Rudolph appears as a hallucination in Circe to criticise his son.

Athos (4) – Rudolph’s dog, pined away and died after his owner killed himself.

Dlugacz (4) – Bloom’s local butcher (referred to as the ‘ferreteyed porkbutcher’). He is a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, similar to Bloom’s own background, yet he sells pork. He wraps Bloom’s kidney in a sheet of newspaper that advertises a Zionist land-settlement project named Agendath Netaim (Hebrew for ‘Union of Planters’) which Bloom reads and whose name recurs.

Sweny’s (4) – specifically, F.W. Sweny & Co. Ltd, the chemist’s shop where Bloom goes to order a lotion for his wife, Molly, and buys a bar of lemon-scented soap, promising to come back later and pay, which he doesn’t, despite nagging thoughts.

Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (mentioned in 4, 10, 11) – flashy, popular concert promoter who’s arranging a concert tour for Bloom’s wife, Molly. In chapter 4, ‘Calypso’, Bloom picks up a letter from his doormat from him to Molly and hands it to her in bed. Somehow he knows that they’ve made a date for today, 4pm, when Boylan is going to come round and have sex with her, and is haunted by the knowledge all day and keeps catching glimpses of him in the street. Boylan is a ‘spruce figure’ wearing ‘a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ we see him buying fruit as a present for Molly and, characteristically, flirting with the salesgirl. In ‘Sirens’ he flirts with the barmaids and buys drinks for himself and Lenehan.

5. Lotus Eaters: Bloom wanders round central Dublin, from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay through Lime Street toward Westland Row, Lincoln Place (near Sweny’s pharmacy) and ending near Merrion Square

Charlie M’Coy (5, 10, 15) – small-time local conman, swindler and acquaintance of Bloom’s; asks Bloom to add his name to the list of Dignam’s mourners, despite not attending the funeral. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’ accompanying Lenehan.

Bantam Lyons (5, 8) – a shabby gambler. In ‘Lotus Eaters’ (5) while looking for racing tips, Lyons asks to borrow Bloom’s newspaper, Bloom tells him to keep it because he was ‘going to throw it away’ which Lyons interprets as ‘Throwaway’ being the name of a horse to bet on. When Lyons mentions this to others, Bloom acquires a spurious reputation for having ‘inside information’. The joke outcome of this little storyline is that the horse ‘Throwaway’ actually wins the race, much to the vexation of Lenehan and other characters.

6. Hades: Paddy Dignam’s funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery

Paddy Dignam (6) – dead, died a few days before the novel starts, dropped dead of ‘apoplexy’ probably meaning heart attack. We learn that Dignam had mortgaged his life insurance policy to pay off debts, leaving his wife and five orphans penniless. His funeral is a central event in the first half of the narrative, attended by Bloom, Simon Dedalus and others. ‘As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said.’ His young son, Patsy, pops up briefly in Wandering Rocks. He may be an avatar of the Homeric figure of Elpenor in The Odyssey, who dies after he drunkenly falls overboard. After the funeral ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows Bloom visiting the Dignam home on Newbridge Avenue to offer assistance, but he also seems to visit her again. The reason Bloom looks into Barney Kiernan’s pub is he’s looking for Martin Cunningham to jointly pay her another visit; they are going to fiddle Paddy’s insurance policy to get her some of the money Paddy had mortgaged away.

Patrick Aloysius ‘Patsy’ Dignam (6, 10) – young son of Paddy Dignam, appears in ‘Hades’ and again in ‘Wandering rocks’. Represents the pitiful next generation, impoverished by this generation’s fecklessness.

Simon Dedalus (6, 7, 10, 11) – Stephen’s father. According to ‘Portrait’ was affluent enough in his early married years to send Stephen to a fee-paying school, but then went steadily downhill, unable to keep a steady job and continuing to impregnate his wife (who endures 13 pregnancies!). In ‘A Portrait’ Stephen gives a comic resumé of his father’s career:

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes. —A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Now he mostly makes money by pawning family possessions. He’s one of the three others with Leopold in the carriage to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Bloom thinks: ‘Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son’ but also: ‘Most amusing expressions that man finds’. Wears glasses. Pops up in the newspaper office in Aeolus, in the National Library in Scylla and Charybdis, briefly in Wandering Rocks, and at the Ormond Hotel in Sirens, eating, drinking and then singing along with other characters who play the piano and perform. He sings the aria ‘M’appari tutt’amor’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, a song about lost love that moves Bloom thinking about his own marital situation.

Martin Cunningham (6, 12) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage, a kindly sympathetic friend to Leopold Bloom. He organises help for the Dignam family and defends Bloom against antisemitic slurs in ‘Hades’ and ‘Cyclops’. He has a beard and looks a bit like Shakespeare. He has to cope with an alcoholic wife.

Mr Power (6) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage – a Dublin official associated with the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin Castle – good looking – keeps a mistress – commits a faux pas when (in the funeral carriage with Bloom and two others) he opines that suicide is ‘the greatest disgrace to have in the family’ unaware that Bloom’s father, Rudolph, committed suicide.

Corny Kelleher (6, 10, 15) – an undertaker’s assistant working for H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlour, a shadowy figure connected to both death and the police, maybe an avatar of Charon the ferryman. He appears in ‘Hades’ (6) and ‘Wandering Rocks’ (10). In ‘Circe’ (15) he helps handle the police but doesn’t offer to take drunken Stephen home, that’s left to Bloom.

Ned Lambert (6, 7) – at the cemetery, a cheerful, well-connected Dubliner, a friend of Simon Dedalus. He is a seed and grain merchant who manages a grain store in St. Mary’s Abbey. He appears at Paddy Dignam’s funeral (6) then the Evening Telegraph offices (7) then showing the reverend Hugh Love around the Abbey in ‘Wandering Rocks’. Known for his wit and boasts about his influential relatives like his uncle, the Vice-Chancellor.

Father Coffey (6) – officiates at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, muscular, and ‘jowly’. Bloom thinks he ‘barks’ the funeral mass. Insofar as he mediates between the world of the living and the dead, maybe an avatar of Cerberus the dog at the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology.

John O’Connell (6) – real-life Superintendent of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, a respected local figure known for telling humorous stories e.g the one about the two drunks and Mulcahy’s statue. Insofar as he presides over the cemetery, an avatar of the Greek god of the underworld (Hades in Greek, Pluto in Latin).

Tom Kernan (6, 10) – tea salesman, agent for Pulbrook Robertson & Co. tea merchants. He was the central figure, the heavy drinking alcoholic who his friends set out to reform in the Dubliners short story ‘Grace’. Here we learn that Kernan is a Protestant, a detail that surfaces when he is part of the funeral party in ‘Hades’ and critically comments on the ‘rushed Catholic services’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he discusses a recent shipping disaster with Bloom and then in ‘Sirens’, encourages the baritone Ben Dollard to sing ‘The Croppy Boy’. His friends mock him for his use of pretentious phrases.

Joe Hynes (6, 7, 12) – unreliable, small-time reporter for the Freeman’s Journal who covers Paddy Dignam’s funeral; in his subsequent report he misspells Bloom as ‘Boom’, an error which rings through the rest of the story. Similarly, he asks for the name of a mystery man at the funeral and mishears the reply that he’s wearing a mackintosh for the man’s name, which he reports incorrectly as ‘M’intosh’, another joke error which recurs. Known for his financial unreliability, he borrows three shillings from Leopold and doesn’t repay it. Previously appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’.

John Henry Menton (6, 15) – a petty, arrogant solicitor and commissioner of affidavits who we meet in the ‘Hades’ chapter. He holds a long-standing grudge against Bloom who beat him in a game of bowls and so coldly rebuffs Bloom’s attempt to fix his dented hat after the funeral. Insofar as he spurns the hero (Bloom/Ulysses) he is maybe an avatar of Ajax, a Greek hero spurned by Odysseus, who ignores him when Odysseus visits the underworld. He appears in the hallucinated jury of the ‘Circe’ chapter.

Reuben J. Dodd (6) – a real-life Dublin solicitor and moneylender, portrayed by other characters as an avaricious Jew. At the cemetery other characters discuss rumours of his son’s suicide attempt in the River Liffey.

7. Aeolus: in the newspaper offices of the Freeman’s Journal on Prince’s Street

Red Murray (7) – a minor character in ‘Aeolus’, an employee at the Freeman’s Journal office who helps Bloom arrange for a newspaper paragraph to appear about his client, Alexander Keyes.

Joseph Nannetti (7) – a real-life historical figure, a rising Dublin politician and printer who was working as the foreman at the Freeman’s Journal where Bloom encounters him. The real Nannetti went on to be Mayor of Dublin (1906 to 1908).

Professor McHugh (7) – brilliant but lazy, haphazard academic. Encountered hanging out in the Freeman’s Journal office bantering with other time wasters like Ned Lambert, Simon Dedalus and J.J. O’Molloy. ‘Professor MacHugh’s unshaven blackspectacled face’. His most significant moment is reciting a (real) speech by barrister John F. Taylor which compared the Irish language revival movement to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.

For an interesting article about all the characters found in the newspaper office, see:

• Who Were the Real Men in Aeolus’ Newsroom?

J. J. O’Molloy (7, 10) – a once-promising but now struggling Dublin lawyer, portrayed as down on his luck and in debt, haunting newspaper offices like the Freeman’s Journal, for loans while maintaining a veneer of respectability and knowledge of oratory. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

Myles Crawford (7) – pompous, alcoholic editor of the Evening Telegraph and Freeman’s Journal, dismisses Bloom’s polite approaches but fawns over Stephen when he later appears.

Matthew Lenehan (7) – a parasite, hanger-on, freelance journalist and horse-racing tipster. One of the two characters in the Dubliners story, ‘Two Gallants’ where he leaches on a fancy man who screws money out of his girlfriend. Desperate scrounger. He appears in ‘Aeolus’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, Sirens’ and among the medical students in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. He is obsessed with the Ascot Gold Cup, backs a horse called Sceptre and is infuriated when Bloom’s tip, Throwaway, wins instead.

Mr O’Madden Burke (7) – a smooth, sophisticated music critic and reviewer who we first meet in the Dubliners story ‘A Mother’ and who here appears in the newspaper office in ‘Aeolus’). He reappears in ‘Cyclops’, ‘Ithaca’ and is mentioned in ‘Penelope’. Pretentious and self-interested.

8. Lestrygonians

Bloom wanders central Dublin, walks past the Irish House of Parliament and Trinity College, moving from O’Connell Street toward Grafton Street and Kildare Street, deciding not to have lunch at Burton restaurant but grabbing a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy at Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, before walking on and ducking into the National Library to avoid Blazes Boylan.

Mrs Josie Breen (née Powell) (8) – former flame of Leopold Bloom and friend of Molly Bloom, long-suffering wife of the mentally unstable Denis Breen, ‘beauty and the beast’. When Bloom encounters her in ‘Lestrygonians’, he is sad that she looks shabby and haggard-looking.

Denis Breen (8) – Josie’s mentally ill husband – ‘Denis Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison’s hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke earnestly.’ He has recently received an anonymous postcard with ‘U.P.: up’ on it which has made him panic. Scholars interpret it to mean ‘Your time is up’ or ‘You are all washed up’ and more broadly, in the context of the novel, to symbolise failure, paranoia, mockery and modern confusion – recurring themes in the novel.

Little Alf Bergan (8, 12, 15) – a Dublin character and assistant to sub-sheriff Long John Fanning. In ‘Lestrygonians’ he spots Denis Breen and explains the story about the ‘U.P.: up’ postcard. He plays a role in ‘Cyclops’ by bringing to Barney Kiernan’s pub a cache of applications for the job of state hangman which triggers a tipsy discussion about hangings. Crops up (like everyone else) in Circe.

Nosey Flynn (8) – a greasy, gossipy Dublin pub regular, often found at Davy Byrne’s, known for his intrusive questions and snuffling manner. First appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’.

Davy Byrne (8) – owner of the eponymous bar where Bloom drops in for a ‘gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy’. A careful, moral man who doesn’t gamble. The sandwich and wine give Bloom wind which he passes under cover of a passing tram at the end of ‘Sirens’.

Paddy Leonard (8, 15) – minor character seen around the pubs who crops up in ‘Lestrygonians’ and ‘Circe’.

Tom Rochford (8) – struggling inventor who in ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows off his device, designed for music halls to show which act is on stage, which he hopes to promote to Blazes Boylan.

Sir Frederick Falkiner (8) – a real Dublin magistrate (Recorder of Dublin) known for his antisemitic judgments, appears as a symbol of legal hypocrisy and judicial bias, particularly towards Jews like Bloom. Bloom encounters him in ‘Lestrygonians’ and later hallucinates him sentencing him to prison in ‘Circe’.

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (8, 10) – a real-life Dublin eccentric known as ‘Endymion’, appears in ‘Lestrygonians and ‘Wandering Rocks’, recognized by his long name, tight hat, and dangling stick-umbrella-dustcoat.

9. Scylla and Charybdis: in the director’s office of the Irish National Library on Kildare Street

The quaker librarian (9) – unnamed Head Librarian of the National Library, tiptoeing in and out of Stephen’s lecture about Shakespeare in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.

John Eglinton (9) – fictional name for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian, who listens sympathetically to Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture.

Mr Best (9) – another of the auditors of Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture, based on the real-life Irish Celtic scholar and librarian Richard Irvine Best, he is depicted as a refined but shallow young man, signalled by his frequent use of the phrase ‘don’t you know’.

A.E. (9) – pseudonym of the real-life Irish poet, writer and mystic George Russell, who used the pseudonym Æ, a central figure in literary circles and a spiritual advisor. He is the main audience for Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture where he represents the old, spiritual, platonic view of art and so is unsympathetic to Stephen’s aggressively realist and autobiographical reading of Shakespeare.

10. Wandering Rocks: 19 vignettes depicting numerous Dubliners, many of them real-life figures

John Conmee S.J. (10) – ‘The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.’ first figure we meeting in ‘Wandering Rocks’ having a series of encounters with passersby in which he is blandly polite. Real-life figure, rector at Clongowes Wood College who was kind to a young James Joyce and instrumental in securing scholarships for Joyce and his brothers to Belvedere College.

Master Brunny Lynam (10) – boy who Father Conmee gets to post a letter for him at a postbox across the road.

Mr Denis J. Maginni (10) – a real-life Dublin dancing professor – ‘professor of dancing &c, in a silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots’. In ‘Circe’ when Stephen dances with prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel, he imagines Maginni is there coaching him.

Mrs M’Guinness (10) real-life figure who owned a pawn shop, M’Guinness’s, where Stephen’s sisters (Katey and Boody) attempt to pawn some of Stephen’s books to buy food. Mrs M, ‘stately, silverhaired’, is greeted and bows to nice Father Conmee.

Katey, Boody and Maggy Dedalus (10) – boiling clothes, making yellow peasoup, living in poverty, shaming clever Stephen who had all the advantages in life.

Almidano Artifoni (10) – a music teacher and singer who appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’, bumping into Stephen and suggesting he pursue a lucrative professional singing career, which Stephen rejects.

Miss Dunne (10) – typist, secretary to Blazes Boylan, sits in her office daydreaming or reading a romance novel. Types the date ’16 June 1904′, the only confirmation of the date on which Ulysses takes place (Bloomsday). She speaks with Blazes Boylan via telephone, relaying that Lenehan will be at the Ormond Hotel at four o’clock.

The reverend Hugh C. Love (10) – amateur historian being shown round St Mary’s Abbey by Ned Lambert, who’s in charge of the grain store in the abbey’s cellar.

Dilly Dedalus (10) – one of Stephen’s impoverished siblings. He bumps into her in ‘Wandering Rocks’, where she asks if he’s seen their father, then shows him a tatty French primer she’s bought at a second-hand stall, prompting Stephen’s feelings of pity and guilt.

Ben Dollard (10, 11) – large, good-natured and formerly successful Dublin bass singer with a big beard, often called ‘Big Ben’. Friend of Simon Dedalus, appears in ‘Wandering Rocks’, plays the piano and sings the sentimental ballad ‘The Croppy Boy’ in ‘Sirens’.

John Wyse Nolan (10, 12) – a minor nationalist character in ‘Cyclops’ who shares anti-British nationalistic views with the but is more moderate and briefly sympathetic to Bloom.

Long John Fanning (10) – fictional subsheriff of Dublin, first referenced in the Dubliners story ‘Grace’, appears here being discussed in ‘Aeolus’, appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’ then appears in his role as sub-sheriff in Bloom’s masochistic court fantasy in ‘Circe’.

John Howard Parnell (10) – real-life figure, the brother of the superfamous Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell who, at the peak of his power, was ruined by being cited as the co-respondent in a divorce case and died soon after, in disgrace, in 1891. John was a city marshal in Dublin and the registrar of pawnbrokers but his role in the novel is to be a ghostly figure symbolising the haunting memory of Irish political failure. He is spotted by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he is seen in a bar playing chess against himself.  Inward-turning, failed, paralysis, all Joyce’s themes. In the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’ Bloom imagines him offering a blessing, linking the ordinary, fading John Howard with the immense, mythic status of his dead brother.

11. Sirens: the bar and dining room of the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay on the north bank of the River Liffey

Richie Goulding (11) – Stephen’s uncle, brother of Stephen’s dead mother, May, married to Sara hence Aunt Sara. A struggling solicitor’s clerk, depicted as a slightly pathetic figure, with a bad back, often weighed down by a legal bag but enthusiastic about music. In ‘Sirens’ Bloom has dinner with him at the Ormond Hotel.

Miss Mina Kennedy (11) – one of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Golden-haired in contrast to Lydia Douce, who is bronze-haired. The pair are like ‘malicious mermaids’ coolly observing the (useless) men in the bar. She is more reserved than the flirtatious Miss Douce.

Miss Lydia Douce (11) – the other of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Bronze-haired barmaid in contrast to golden-haired Mina Kennedy. She is the more outgoing, flirtatious of the two: acting in a suggestive behaviour such as reaching up to emphasise her bosom, snapping her garter for Lenehan, suggestively stroking the phallic-shaped beer pull, and flirting with Blazes Boylan who pops in for a drink and who she has a crush on.

Pat (11) – waiter at the Ormond, old, bald and hard of hearing, moving between the dining room (where Bloom has dinner) and the bar. ‘Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait.’

The piano tuner (11) – young, unnamed character known as the ‘blind stripling’. Kindly helped across the road by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’; rudely bumped into by Cashel ‘lamppost’ Farrell in ‘Wandering Rocks’; arrives at the Ormond Hotel to retrieve the tuning fork he’d left behind, and where he plays the piano, among others.

George Lidwell (11) – real-life Dublin solicitor and acquaintance of Joyce’s father. Offices nearby on Upper Ormond Quay, Lidwell is a ‘suave solicitor’ flirts with the barmaids. (Joyce consulted Lidwell in 1912 regarding legal issues with the publisher of ‘Dubliners’.)

12. Cyclops: Barney Kiernan’s pub

Narrator (12) – drops into Barney Kiernan’s pub to see the Citizen.

Geraghty (12) – doesn’t appear but is described as a ‘foxy’ (red-haired) plumber and a debtor who has stolen goods from a merchant named Moses Herzog.

The Citizen (12) – dominant figure in chapter 12, Cyclops. Supposedly based on Michael Cusack, the real-life founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association though scholars argue he’s more of a composite of radical nationalists of the era. The Homeric parallel is with the Cyclops Polyphemus because, like the one-eyed giant, the Citizen is depicted as narrow-minded, aggressive and blinded by his own prejudices.

Garryowen (12) – the Citizen’s mangy dog whose constant rumbling and occasional barking put everyone on edge. At the end of the chapter the Citizen sets him on Bloom who only just manages to jump onto a cab and make his escape. Comedically, Garryowen is mentioned by Gerty MacDowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter (13) as actually belonging to her grandpapa Giltrap, and she calls him ‘a lovely dog’, really bringing out her rose-tinted view of everything.

Bob Doran (12) – first appeared a respectable, anxious employee in a wine-merchant’s office in the Dubliners short story ‘The Boarding House’. Since then he’s gone downhill and is now encountered as a drunk, weeping, rambling figure in Barney Kiernan’s pub, getting maudlin about the death of Paddy Dignam, adding to the general atmosphere of degraded chaos.

Terry O’Ryan (12) – bartender in Barney Kiernan’s pub – ‘Same again, Terry’.

Pisser Burke (12) – nickname of Andrew Burke, minor character and associate of the Cyclops narrator, known for spreading gossip around Dublin, tells stories from when he knew the Blooms when they lived at the City Arms Hotel.

13. Nausicaa: Sandymount Strand

Cissy Caffrey (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, looking after her young twin brothers, Jacky and Tommy. A non-nonsense straight-talking contrast with Gerty (see below) for example the way she goes straight over to loitering Bloom to ask him the time. In ‘Circe’ she returns in degraded form, apparently working as a prostitute while interacting with British soldiers.

Edy Boardman (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, the only mother so pushing a pram, she represents reality and maturity in contrast with Gerty’s self-deceiving romanticism. Makes cutting remarks which irritate Gerty. She and Cissy equate to the retinue of fine ladies who accompanied Princess Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey.

Tommy and Jacky Caffrey (13) – boisterous twin brothers looked after by their much older sister, Cissy.

Gerty MacDowell (13) – the young woman on the beach who Bloom watches from a distance, provocatively posing for him as he masturbates and while her head overflows with romantic, reality-denying fantasies.

14. Oxen of the Sun: National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street

Dr Horne (14) – a real-life figure, Sir Andrew J. Horne, a prominent Dublin obstetrician and the Joint Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

Nurse Quigley (14) – continually telling the drunken gang off for keeping the pregnant women in the ward above awake with their racket, inn the Homeric parallel, for disrespecting the sacredness of fertility – ‘an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage’.

Dr Dixon (14) – junior doctor at the hospital. Recognises Bloom and invites him to join the party in the common room. Later goes to attend Mrs Purefoy who’s finally had her baby.

Crotthers (14) – ‘the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow’ – ‘Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway’.

Madden (14) – ‘the squat form of Madden’ – another drunk medical student.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello (14) – medical student, the drunkest member of the party, frequently interrupting the quiet of the hospital with ribald drinking songs. Nicknamed ‘Punch’ from his habit of ‘dinging’ any table he’s sitting at with his fist.

Alec Bannon (14) – brought along by Mulligan to the hospital. Boyfriend of Bloom’s 15-year-old daughter, Milly.

Nurse Callan (14) – nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, half-way through the chapter announces the birth of a son to Mina Purefoy.

Bridie Kelly (14, 15, 16) – young working-class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (she also appears in ‘Circe’ and ‘Eumaeus’). One of the chapter’s Gothic paragraphs describes her as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

15. Circe

Too many to be listed. See my standalone review of Circe.

16. Eumaeus

Gumley (16) – nightwatchmen asleep in his ‘sentrybox’ by the docks.

Corley (16) – unemployed, scrounging son of a Dublin police inspector who asks Stephen for money – first appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Two Gallants’, extracting money from a naive girlfriend – nicknamed Lord John Corley because his mother was a servant in the house of an aristocrat

D.B. Murphy (16) – a sailor, teller of tale tales, possessor of impressive tattoos.

Skin-the-Goat (Fitzharris) (16) – owner of the shelter.

Streetwalker (16) – ‘glazed and haggard under a black straw hat’, briefly looks through the door of the shelter and makes Bloom duck behind the newspaper in embarrassment so is she Bridie Kelly who he tells us he lost his virginity to.

17. Ithaca

Stephen and Bloom.

18. Penelope

They don’t actually physically appear, but present in Molly’s thoughts are quite a few final characters:

Mrs Riordan (18) – who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’.

Mary Driscoll (18) – the Blooms’ scullerymaid.

Bartell DArcy (18) – tenor singer who kissed her in church.

Mrs Hester Stanhope (18) – adult friend when Molly was a girl.

Lieutenant Mulvey (18) – ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion, they kissed.

Mrs Rubio (18) – elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio.

Lunita Laredo (18) – Molly’s mother, a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent.

Mrs Fleming (18) – useless cleaner they had, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work.

Dr Collins (18) – Molly’s gynaecologist, impressed her with his long learnèd words.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg

Joyce reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope

• Ulysses, James Joyce and Jacques Derrida
• Ulysses by James Joyce: cast list
• Ulysses by James Joyce: famous quotes