The Cyclops

Not only is the "Cyclops" episode one of the most memorable of Homer's epic, but this chapter is, for my money, one of the best and funniest in the novel. In Homer, Odysseus finds himself in the land of the brutal, lawless, one-eyed Cyclopes, imprisoned in a cave by Polyphemus, who is swallowing Odysseus's men two at a time. Telling Polyphemus that his name is "No Man," Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk on wine, pokes out his one eye with a pointed, flaming spear, and escapes the cave by hiding under Polyphemus's sheep as they exit the cave. As he sails away in triumph, Odysseus commits a fatal error by revealing his true name, an action that allows Polyphemus to enlist the help of his father Poseidon (the sea god) to make the rest of Odysseus's journey miserable.

The Joycean counterpart to the raging Polyphemus is "The Citizen," a physically powerful yet small-minded and xenophobic Irish nationalist whose myopia causes him to see things in a distorted and narrow-minded way. Here the narrative structure is essential to an understanding of the section, for the chapter contains two narrators. The primary narrator is the nameless first-person ("I"/"eye") misanthrope who narrates the goings on on Barney Kiernan's pub from the perspective of deflation and reduction, treating Bloom and others with a great deal of scorn and ridicule. This narrator's tale, however, is interrupted some 33 times by parodies embodying "various pompous, sensational, or sentimental literary styles" (Gifford 314). Thus, the second "narrator," often referred to as the parodist, serves to inflate and exaggerate the importance of the actions of the chapter by relating them according to any number of writing styles, the most prominent being the overinflated style of the Irish Revivalists (recall the Library chapter) attempting to translate/rewrite ancient Irish epics.

Perhaps most notable in this chapter is Bloom's near-heroic response to the anti-Semitism expressed by The Citizen, who, ironically, bemoans Irish oppression. Bloom stands up to The Citizen, not by resorting to physical violence (perhaps Joyce's comment on the post-WWI view that heroism no longer can be equated with military triumphs?), but rather by hurling a series of rejoinders aimed at deflating the Citizen's prejudices -- "The Savior was a jew and his father was a jew ...Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me" (342) -- just as The Citizen hurls a cracker box at Bloom, mirroring the Cyclops's hurling a boulder at Odysseus's ship. However, one of Bloom's finest moments in the novel comes in his confronting the hatred of The Citizen with his doctrine of justice, tolerance, and ... Love. That's right, it takes the Jewish Leopold Bloom to best express and embody the central doctrine of Christ's teachings.