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