In the next chapter, “Nestor,” Stephen teaches at a nearby school and collects his monthly wages from Mr. He still feels guilty for refusing to pray at her deathbed after losing his faith in God, and his roommates are so intolerable that he decides to find another place to sleep that night. They live in a Martello tower, which Stephen has been renting since he returned from Paris to Dublin to see his dying mother a year ago. Similarly, the Odyssey opens with the story of Odysseus’s son Telemachus, rather than Odysseus himself-in fact, the first episode of Ulysses is called “Telemachus.” In this episode, Stephen has breakfast with his roommates, the annoying students Buck Mulligan and Haines.
The novel’s first three chapters deal not with Leopold Bloom, but with Stephen Dedalus, the twenty-two-year-old starving artist who was the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
But it would be misleading to take this parallel too far and assume that every character, event, and theme in the Odyssey maps directly onto Ulysses (or vice-versa). Leopold Bloom’s quest through Dublin is loosely modeled on Homer’s Odyssey-each of the novel’s eighteen chapters (or “episodes”) roughly corresponds to a book from the Odyssey. Although the novel’s plot is deceptively simple, its structure, style, and literary and historical references are incredibly complex. James Joyce’s famously dense and unconventional modernist novel Ulysses follows the advertiser Leopold Bloom as he goes about his day in Dublin, Ireland on June 16, 1904.
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