I, and I’m sure hundreds of others first exposed to Circe, found the episode to be thoroughly challenging due to the rambling and random nature of Bloom’s various dramatic hallucinations.

However, despite the section’s experimental strangeness, I was able to parse out some possible topics of discussion that relate to Bloom’s Judaism. Previously in class, we talked about how Bloom’s Jewishness distanced himself from much of the Irish populace despite the fact Ireland was his home. This episode once more taps into that conflict of identity, but in a more flustered and anxious manner, Bloom being affronted in multiple different hallucinated scenarios.

Even though Circe is an utterly unclear episode, I believe it allows a deeper inspection into Bloom’s character and some of the seeded insecurities that orient his position as an other in Ireland. Not only is Bloom not ethnically Irish, but he is also culturally removed from his Jewishness, “Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?” (15 U. 260-262).

Much of Circe’s hallucinations involve Bloom being accused of various unsavory behaviors and characteristics, a cuckold, an anarchist, even a woman according to Buck Mulligan. Based upon Joyce’s description of Bloom’s identity, these imagined persecutions seem to originate from Bloom’s abjectly diffident demeanor.