Ulysses, a modern waster land

Speaking one of my favorite writers, James Joyce, you can’t ignore of his masterpiece Ulysses, which practically revealed the mental attitude of people living in Dublin at that time and laid a great influence in modern period literature.

To my big surprise, I got the electronic version of this book at a local discount electronics store as a giveaway of purchasing the top bluetooth speakers from there, so I stored it in my flash disk right away. Well, it is time for me to precede my chew-like reading.

Ulysses, Joyce‘s masterpiece, has become a prime example of modernism in literature. It is such an uncommon novel that there raises the question that whether it can be termed as a novel at all: for it seems like lack of almost all the essential qualities of the novel in the traditional sense: there is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in the usual sense. Broadly speaking, Ulysses gives an account of man’s life during one day in Dublin. The three major characters are: Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his wife , Marion Tweedy Bloom, and Stephen Devalues, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man , the novel is divided into 18 episodes are mainly concerned with Stephen Devalues. He is such an lost guy for he had no idea of the meaning of life, he had no felling toward his wife and always step into a kind of illusion that can be called as ridiculous dream , moreover, he keep a horrible mood of aimless for his life and the city he living. The novel ends with the famous monologue by Molly, who is musing in half-wake state over her past experience as a woman. Interestingly, the events happened in a day seems can be termed as a kind of trivial, boring and even banal, but under the events, it is the nature flow of mental reflection, the shifting moods and impulses in the character’s the inner world. Is there a better reflection more frank and penetrating than it？ It is no wonder that James Joyce has being called as a master of presenting us the top stream of conscious method. In Ulysses, Joyce intends to present of microcosm of the whole human life by providing an instance of how a single event contains all the events of its kind, and how history is recapitulated in the happening of one day.

With the complete objectivity and minute details of man’s everyday routines and his psychic processes, Joyce illustrates a symbolic picture of all human history, which is simultaneously tragic and comic, heroic and cowardly, magnificent and dreary . Like Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waster Land, Joyce’s Ulysses presents a realistic picture of the modern wasteland in which modern men are portrayed as vulgar and trivial creature with splitting personalities, disillusioned ideals, sordid minds and broken families, who are searching in vain for harmonious human relationship and spiritual sustenance in a decaying living world.