Tracking my obsession of “the unspoken” throughout Ulysses has been pretty difficult, and in hindsight, I wish I had chosen a much more concrete topic. While this obsession did lend me a lot of wiggle room when it came to posting each night, I do not feel like having it as my obsession gave me a better understanding of the novel, mainly because of how unspecific and massive this obsession could be. That said, I’ll now discuss the ways in which I did find a consistent thread throughout my topic.

Ulysses as a novel has many different styles of narration, and some of these episodes occur completely in the thoughts and minds of Stephen, Bloom, or Molly. What I saw as the three main episodes of unspoken “stream of consciousness” for each character, respectively, were Proteus, Circe, and Penelope. While similar in the basic format, the narration of each episode is incredibly different, which seems like another way that Joyce works to create a sense of individuality in each character. In Proteus, Stephen’s thoughts are difficult to follow, as they trace the works of many great philosophers and writers, but this format is probably the most traditional or common “stream of consciousness”.  but he comes off as incredibly well educated and intelligent, if not a little narcissistic and deliberately obtuse. Bloom is quite obviously not as intelligent as Stephen, but in Circe, his masochistic fantasies reveal an intellect and depth to his character. The style of Circe–set as a play with stage directions–also reflects a greater literary tradition. However, in the final episode of Penelope–which I talked about in my last post–Molly seems to lack these characteristics, and even the way her prose is styled further suggests this lack. While one of the critical articles we read for class points out that Molly’s lack of schooling, and therefore proper grammar and syntax, would have been common at the time, the majority of the content of her thoughts is focused on stereotypically feminine issues. Thus, this is one of the main, more consistent ways in which I saw Joyce using the unspoken elements of the novel to subtly add another complex level to the development of the main characters.