What Is Bloomsday?
Every June 16 at 8 a.m., throngs of devotees of James Joyce descend on Dublin to re-enact the day in the life of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” by visiting the sites to which he wanders and reading passages of the great novel. As Bloom wanders about and reflects upon the city and its effect on him and his place within it, Dublin becomes a microcosm of the world and Bloom’s life a microcosm of human experience. Joyce regarded Homer’s Ulysses as the most “complete” man in literature so he makes his hero, an Irish Jew, into a modern Ulysses as he relates Bloom’s roles as husband, father, son, benefactor, hero, sinner, and cultural outsider and insider. The story is told on different levels and in a multiplicity of shifting styles from the viewpoints of people whom Bloom encounters. The literary technique Joyce essentially created is “stream of consciousness,” in which the protagonists’ thoughts, reactions, and emotions are related in first person as a continuous thou
