Homeric Correspondences and Irish Nationalism in Joyce's "Cyclops"

James Joyce’s novel Ulysses has been analyzed extensively for decades, and the volume of analyses which are still being produced today indicates that we still haven’t scratched the surface of fully understanding all of the novel’s mysteries. This project contributes to these efforts by taking a deeper look into two of the novel’s central aspects, its numerous correspondences to Homer’s The Odyssey and its criticism and subversion of traditional Irish values, and examining how they may be connected to one another. Looking specifically at the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, which is commonly accepted as Joyce’s most biting criticism of extreme Irish nationalism in the novel, the specific correspondences to The Odyssey with regard to the episode’s structure, plot, characters, and themes are identified. Through an analysis of how these correspondences are presented in the episode, critical divergences in how the two works portray their characters and common themes are revealed. The results of this analysis emphasize the importance of looking at Joyce’s novel as a modernist take on the traditional Homeric epic, suggesting that it is largely through these divergences that Joyce elucidates much of the underlying meaning of the episode. The subversion of Homeric themes and characters is shown to be closely connected with the subversion of Irish cultural ideals, further driving Joyce’s criticism of these ideals as outmoded. The perspective gained by analyzing the episode in this context also has quite a bit of relevance to some of the more troubling aspects of present-day western society, supporting the persistent importance of Joyce’s novel as a critical examination of humanity as a whole.