In Homer's Odyssey: In Book XVII Odysseus enters his own palace, still disguised as a beggar, and reconnoiters the scene in preparation for battle. In Book XXI he reveals his true identity as the only person able to string a mighty bow he left behind when he departed for the Trojan War. Book XXII describes the slaughter of all the suitors, by Odysseus, Telemachus, and Eumaeus. Penelope has slept through the battle and does not at first trust that the once-disguised beggar is actually her husband, though eventually she does in Book XXIII.

Science [The Armed Hope]

Antinous—Mulligan

Eurymachus—Boylan

Bow—Reason

Suitors—Scruples

[Eurycleia]

General comments on "Ithaca":

• Bloom is exhausted and his homecoming is far from triumphant, as Odysseus's is in Homer. Although it requires his philosophical acceptance that he cannot expect Molly to be satisfied with him sexually, Bloom is at at last reunited with his Penelope.
  
  
• This style of the episode is stark: it describes events with precision, but with really an excess of cold scientific detail. Joyce said "Ithaca" was his favorite episode and he called it the "ugly duckling of the book." Joyce explained to Frank Budgen, "I am writing 'Ithaca' in the form of a mathematical catechism. All events are resolved into their cosmic physical, psychical etc. equivalents, e.g., Bloom jumping down the area, drawing water from the tap, the mitigation [urination] in the garden, the cone of incense, lighted candle and statue, so that not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze" (qtd. in Ellmann 156).
  
  
• Richard Ellmann, in Ulysses on the Liffey, says that in this chapter, "instead of subjective distortion there is objective distortion. Unreliability gives way to excessive reliability. . . . Opposite to the disorder of 'Eumaeus' is the pedantic order here, the arduous particularization of data, the tracing of tapwater to its reservoir source. . . . By reducing to colorless fact, the imagination is impoverished," though he adds that the impoverishment of mundane details transforms into a wealth of splendid details in the end, beginning when Stephen and Bloom go into the garden to relieve themselves.
  
  
• Harry Blamires, in The Bloomsday Book, sees Bloom's acceptance of Molly's infidelity as the end of a pilgrimage: "He resigns himself contentedly to the human situation. He accepts the world, the two hemispheres, eastern and western, here represented by the two cheeks of Molly's behind, warm, ample, full of promise and comfort. They express the silent, unchangeable animal reality underlying our changing moods and restless cerebration. . . . He kisses each cheek in turn, and the kisses represent his decisive and final Yes" (245).

In Homer's Odyssey: Above all, Penelope is portrayed as being faithful to Odysseus throughout the long years he has been gone, not knowing whether he is alive or dead. She holds off the persistent suitors with stratagems, such as saying she will not marry again until she has finished weaving her father-in-law Laertes's shroud but then undoing the day's work on the loom each evening. When Odysseus does finally reappear, she fears it is a trick of the gods and insists that he prove himself by demonstrating knowledge of the origin of their bed, which he built partly out of a still-living tree. And of course he passes the test and the two live happily ever after. . . .  

The Bed

[∞]

Flesh [fat]

[The past sleeps]

[starry, milky, then new dawn]

Earth

Monologue (female)
[Monologue, Resigned style]

Penelope—earth

Web—movement

[Ulysses, Laertes]

General comments on "Penelope":

• Although at first the style of the episode seems radical, as it appears on the page in sentences of thousands of words, once readers fall into the rhythm of the prose it becomes fairly ordinary and readable.
  
  
• Penelope has been interpreted in a great variety of ways by different critics
  
  
  • Stuart Gilbert views her as "universal," saying that while she "begins small, a very ordinary woman," she ends "as the Great Mother of gods, giants and mankind, a personification of the infinite variety of Nature as she has developed by gradual differentiation from the formless plasma of her beginning" (388). Ultimately Gilbert sees her as more an archetypal character than a realistic one.
    
    
  • On the other hand, she is praised as being absolutely realistic, a faithful portrait of the way a woman conventionally thinks and acts (concern with housework, religion, motherhood, even the ways she views Bloom and Boylan as lovers; perhaps stereotypically as self-contradictory).
    
    
  • Opinions vary as to her intelligence. Stanley Sultan believes she is perceptive and intuitive but uneducated; Robert Richardson, however, condemns her as "querulous, vulgar . . . lazy and stupid" (qtd. in Lyman 193).
    
    
  • Although Joyce noted himself that this chapter is the most "obscene" and Molly does indeed voice her sexual desires with unabashed frankness, some have noted that Molly's attitudes towards both Bloom's and Boylan's sexual preferences suggest she is actually "prudish" at heart. . . .
    
    
• Ultimately, as noted by Stephany Lyman, Molly is portrayed sympathetically, and "through her final words, [she is] an affirmation of the human imagination and of life itself" (193).