I am reading Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us. Kiberd's thesis is that Joyce intended Ulysses to be about and for the common person. Instead, it has become the province of the dilettante and academic specialist who through arcane papers wring the common wisdom from the text. He says, "The need now is for readers who will challenge the bloodless, technocratic explication of texts: amateur readers who will come up with what may appear to be naive, even innocent interpretations" (15). I agree with his idea and I think there is a core plot that is very accessible to the reader.

There is a onelegged sailor in the "Wandering Rocks" episode who has encounters with three characters in the episode. First with Father Conmee near the convent of the sisters of charity, then presumably with Molly Bloom on Eccles Street, and finally 14 Nelson Street where he is observed by Buck Mulligan. In the first two instances he is referred to as "a onelegged sailor" and in the third instance as "the onelegged sailor." Weldon Thornton in his book referred to in the last post considers this description as one of several instances in which character descriptions are "persistently impersonal." When I asked Dr. Ware, my Ulysses professor, about the role of the onelegged sailor he replied "comic relief." Several times the one legged sailor utters the phrases, "For England," and "home and beauty," which sound more like the words of a West Briton than words that would influence Irish persons to give gifts.

Chuck

I am studying the episode "Wandering Rocks" from James Joyce's Ulysses. I am reading from "Voices and Values in Joyce's Ulysses," by Weldon Thornton. This episode has nineteen brief scenes that feature places in Dublin more than the characters, many of whom are minor, themselves. Thornton addresses the issue of the "unreliable secondary narrator." The narrator is assigned responsibility for mistakes in the text as Thornton says, "I take these to be errors made by the narrator, and see their presence in the episode as one further means by which Joyce takes the measure of the narrator and shows his fallibility" (140). An example of an error is, "By the stern stone hand of Grattan," since the statue is made not of stone, but of bronze. Obviously, Joyce knew better. Thornton even offers additional evidence to demonstrate that Joyce intended that the error be there.

Why would Joyce want a "fallible" narrator? And why would Joyce have had the narrator make the error? Does the fallibility of the narrator have a purpose in this episode? Or is it the errors presented that have a purpose?

My view is that Joyce created the narrator and, so, if the narrator if fallible in stating an error then Joyce had some aesthetic reason for doing so.

Chuck