Ulysses -- Cyclops

I finished the "Cyclops" chapter, which, as I mentioned earlier is one of my favorites.

It's almost a perfect balance between Joyce's tomfoolery with language and obscurity.  The parody in "Nausicaa" gets old after a while, while the "Sirens" is hard to understand.  But here, Joyce seemingly effortlessly jumps from Dublin dialect to mock-heroic narration to newspaper reportage, each one as funny as the next.

At the same time, the actual events are simpler to follow than "Oxen of the Sun" (at least for me).  Bloom confronts an anti-semite, utters a stinging blow (verbally, of course), and then retreats with the citizen throwing a can at his retreating cab.  Aside from the humor of the mock-heroism, I think Joyce uses it to show that it can take a measure of heroism to confront evil in our own daily lives.  At first, Bloom endures meekly the taunts of the others, but at the end he comes back in to say "Your God was a Jew like me."

Bloom has been spending some time trying to get money for Paddy Dignam's widow and children, for which he is also roundly mocked and criticized.  I think that his continuing in this thankless task is also a heroic action.

Joyce then elevates Bloom to Elijah-like status (some say Christ-figure, but I think it's worth noting that he's riding on a "chariot", which is a thing associated with Elijah).  We could see this as a mockery of Bloom, but I think that Joyce is ennobling him; Bloom is a hero, even if his foes are not obvious bad guys like the cyclops.