The Ancient Influences on James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

Reworking and adapting classical stories has been a common trait of many famous texts from the Romance and Modern eras. Possibly one of the most striking parallels between a modern, contemporary text and a classic one is the similar structure and character models between James Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey. In this essay, I intend to show how Joyce uses form and content from The Odyssey in his novel, Ulysses.

The three main characters of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Mary Bloom, all take on the roles of three important characters from Homer’s epic; firstly, Stephen Dedalus is a man searching for a father figure, just as Telemachus searches for his actual father, Leopold Bloom parallels Odysseus as they both spend much of the story on a wandering journey, and finally Mary Bloom takes after Penelope with her many suitors.

Stephen Dedalus is the clearest example of ancient influence on Joyce’s work, as his name derives from Daedalus, the mythical ancient Greek craftsman, and father of Icarus, who creates a set of wings for himself and his son to escape Crete, a story which is recounted in Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This immediately links this character to the ancient Greeks, where we go on to find he embodies elements of the Telemachus character from The Odyssey. The parallels between the modern Irish character and the ancient Greek one begin with Dedalus leaving his home of Martello Tower to get away from Mulligan, who he thinks of as an “Usurper”, similar to Telemachus…