Northrop Frye states, "The novel tends to be extroverted and personal; its chief interest is in human character as it manifests itself in society" (308). He describes this quality in Ulysses as, "the clarity with which the sights and sounds and smells of Dublin come to life, the rotundity of the character drawing, and the naturalness of the dialogue" (313). For Frye the novel is only one of the prose narrative forms, the others are: romance, confession, and anatomy. Frye elaborates on how the four prose narrative forms manifest themselves in Ulysses when he says, "Ulysses then, is a complete prose epic with all four forms employed in it, all of practically equal importance, and all essential to one another, so that the book is a unity and not an aggregate" (314).

I think Frye has it right. I have yet to find anyone else who who agrees with him. Some call Ulysses a "novel" without examining what that means. However, many view it for its structure and how the plot develops within that structure---the Freytag model. Here is a Wikipedia discussion of the Freytag model.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure

Despite this caveat, "Freytag's analysis was intended to apply not to modern drama, but rather to ancient Greek and Shakespearean drama," most novels have the structure described in the article. If a prose narrative doesn't follow this model, including the Peripeteia (climax), the reader may have the feeling that something is absent. With Ulysses knowledgeable authorities differ on which episode is the one that contains the Peripeteia.

The page citations above are from Anatomy of Criticism by Nothrop Frye. The photo is of Northrop Frye.

The Ormond Quay Hotel, the place of the Sirens episode in Ulysses, is special to me. When I took the Ulysses course from Dr. Ware at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in the autumn of 2000 I went to Dublin to visit the sites of the episodes. One of these sites was the Ormond Quay Hotel. I saw the concert room, which was empty at the time. It was semi-dark with a reddish cast that evoked a mysterious mien. One could imagine that the ghosts of the characters in the episode met daily to reenact the experience described in Ulysses complete with its musicality. I wanted to see the hotel when I was in Dublin recently in October 2011 so I took the Dublin city bus to the Phoenix Park Gate on Infirmary Road. I walked through the park and out the lower gate. This is the same gate through which, "The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern quays," in the Wandering Rocks episode. This gate is shown in the picture in my blog entry of August 7, 2011. I walked from the park along the north side of the River Liffey passing the various quays where the viceregal cavalcade had continued its journey on June 16, 1904. As the reader will recall the sirens of the Ormond hotel, Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, looked out over the crossblind and viewed the cavalcade. When I reached the Ormond Quay I imagined that I might see "Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar," but instead I saw graffiti on the walls and a padlocked door with a for sale sign overhead. What a horrible sight. Evidently, before Ireland had experienced hard economic times with the rest of the world there had been plans to build apartments on this site. Certainly, there are many of the Ulysses sites still intact for instance the Martello tower and the Glasnevin cemetery. These will remain. Each site has a semblance that grows from what goes into the corresponding episode. For music and romance the concert room of the Ormond Quay Hotel is without equal.

The greatest eruption known at the Ormond Quay Hotel until now has been Bloom's burgundy induced flatulence. Let us hope the hotel never suffers the massive eruption of the wrecking ball.