Calypso

Leopold Bloom is a prisoner, and imprisonment has made him extremely humane. Its a sensitivity directed to the entire Ulyssesian universe and all its contents (it knows no bounds). The opening paragraph of the chapter, which has Bloom as a civilized savage, belies his humanity; Bloom realizes that the "inner organs of beasts and fowls" he consumes are just that, something physical, once alive, still tinged with a "faint scent of urine". On p. 59, at the butcher's, Bloom seees a picture of a heifer in a field in a newspaper. The image fascinates him and he considers it from several angles: "He held the page aslant paitiently, bending his senses and his will, his soft subject gaze at rest."

These are quotidian objects of his sensitive consciousness; the tragic and truly affecting things in Bloom's life, we might imagine, would cripple him. The death of his son, and more immediately, the clues he gets that his much loved wife Molly (who has him practically serving her on hand and foot), these to Bloom must be truly devastating. But no, Joyce has a far more nuanced character: the tragedies Bloom has suffered have not made him into an obsessive, wringing his hands and cursing his fate, but rather made the world Bloom occupies fecund with meaning: "A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow."

An interesting passage has Bloom looking at Molly's pulp fiction, Ruby, the Pride of the Ring: "Hello. Illustration. Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked. Sheet kindly lent. The monster Maffei desisted and flung his victim from him with an oath. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look away..." From there he goes on to wonder about souls, specifically the deceased Dignam's soul.

Bloom is far and away my favorite character in Ulysses; his perception is so accute, and his feelings are so sensitive. He's on a mission: a mission of love.