I found that Bloom is implicated centrally and in multiple ways within the opposition of native versus foreign in episodes 4-8. In contrast to Stephen, Bloom is established immediately as a character with the capacity and tendency to consider life from perspectives other than his own and to seemingly impulsively put himself in the shoes of others. In this fundamental way, Bloom’s very nature is one which repeatedly blurs the lines between native and foreign, foreign here being configured as that which is foreign to the self. One of the instances that Joyce uses to establish Bloom as such comes at the beginning of episode 4, when Bloom daydreams of the Orient, and then breaks away from this stereotyped fantasy when he considers that his conception of this foreign land is one that has perhaps been dictated untruthfully. In this moment, Bloom’s openmindedness is the means through which Joyce brings into relief a crucial distinction between the foreign that is depicted and that which actually exists. That Bloom in falls back into the daydream of the Orient despite that he has made this recognition at later points in the texts suggests both Bloom’s desire to escape his immediate circumstances as well as his ability to find comfort in that which he knows to be unreal.

In these episodes, another way in which Bloom is configured into the opposition of native vs. foreign is through his relationship to the land, both literally and figuratively. At the end of episode 4, Bloom considers working in his garden in some specificity, revealing a knowledge that seems to convey a strong connection with the land and desire to maintain it. Yet he ultimately decides against it because the last time he gardened he was stung by a bee. Here and in other instances in this episode (e.g. when Bloom considers buying a tract of land in a newly founded Zionist colony and when he reveals that he pays a gardener to pull the weeds that surround Rory’s grave), Bloom exhibits a desire to cultivate (and perhaps also, exploit) the land, to profit both materially and spiritually from this work,  yet also an aversion towards this work and unwillingness to perform it himself. Here the reader is forced to consider whether

In chapters 7 & 8, Bloom’s appears to be the foreigner, the outsider, within the social spaces and situations that he must navigate. Despite that his social manor clashes starkly with those of the characters with whom he interacts in these episodes, he is also aligned with the nationalist cause (most clearly at the beginning of chapter 8), and thereby comes to occupy both the position of the native and the foreigner. Considering that Bloom is the only Jewish character that we have encountered in the text thus far, his is further enforced through MacHugh’s equation of the Irish to the Jews in Egypt that he sustains throughout the episode. In episode 9, Bloom reveals that his conception of home, the foundation of a “native” positioning, is contingent both upon sex and food, which are most notably carnal rather than political aspects.