Performance in Ulysses seems most closely tied to identity and the power or disenfranchisement that identity provides. People create themselves or else are created: the balance of power seems to lie in who does the naming. Gerty’s performance of sexuality for Bloom gives her (in her mind) the disembodied romance she’s wanted, but when Bloom sees her lame leg she loses her sexual power and becomes pathetic in his eyes, “left on the shelf” for her “defect” (368). Buck Mulligan’s ease with his performative selves lend him a kind of ominous power as he traverses the same social circles in which Stephen and Bloom struggle; Stephen’s nervousness about his inability to “dress the character” mimic Bloom’s eager-to-please shapeshifting in ‘Circe,’ where he changes at each demand for a new stereotype: as Jew, as woman, as infant, and so on.

If the characters perform identity for one another to the extent that it’s difficult to discern actual identities, authenticity might come from the narrative forms themselves: book 4, in entering Bloom’s head, shows a scope of self-understanding that’s far more complex and comprehensive than the trope-selves he performs in ‘Circe’; the panorama of individuals in ‘Wandering Rocks’ are understood through thoughts more than through titles (or the titles are reflected in their thoughts: see “the superior” John Conmee, who smiles often, recalling he “had cleaned his teeth…with arecanut paste” (219)). Likewise the contrast between the glib romanticism for the first half of ‘Nausicaa’ and Bloom’s brutal fragmented consciousness in the second half show far more about the characters understandings of themselves and the world than they profess to understand aloud. In short, the forms narrative takes in Ulysses attempt to understand and unpack, even as the expressions and performances of the characters within attempt to confound.