This last section seemed to thematically align with the Odyssey, in the sense that Molly’s parallel with Penelope feels like a kind of homecoming. Through Molly’s thinking, a lot of anxieties expressed by Bloom and Stephen seem to be resolved: she talks about adultery with a kind of casual sensibility (“Why can’t you kiss a man without going and marrying him first” (740) ), thinks about religion and atheism with equal light contempt, thinking first about lecherous priests and then about “atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest” (782), and seems to hold both Irishness and Jewishness in herself without as much difficulty as Bloom does, citing her “Irish beauty” and worrying about her “accent” when speaking with an Englishman (771, 762), and recalling Stephen and Buck Mulligan’s nationalistic little discussion about the tea in Book 1 with her affinity for “throw[ing] a handful of tea into the pot” (751); at the same time, she talks about “being jewess” without any apparent insecurity (771). At the same time, she’s also light about national identity, noting some as “sincerely Irish…judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him” (782).

She’s also a kind of pivot point or center for all of her affairs: both Gardner in “South Africa,” and Harry Mulvey “on the black water” seem like parallel Blooms/Odysseuses with their “voyages those men have to make to the end of the world and back” (762). Molly is anchored in herself: as both a national symbol and a female symbol she seems to be oriented in and as the home.