Nausicaa

This chapter is split into two prose styles. The first half is written like a novel for women, not unlike Sweets of Sin. It ends with Bloom ejaculating as the fireworks reach their climax. The second half of "Nausicaa" is written in the stream of consciousness style Joyce has established in "Lotus Eaters", "Calypso" and "Hades".

The second half of the chapter gives the reader some biographical information about Bloom, Molly, and Milly: where they used to live, Molly's first kiss and memories of Milly as a little girl. It also features Bloom's reflections about menstruation, the moon, and sailors, and so is thematically important.

But the first half of the chapter is undoubtedly more interesting in itself. In this set piece, Joyce skewers both mediocre prose and lower middle class ambition. The tepid writing confuses phrases like the "apple of dischord" and the "golden rule". It shows the Virgin Mary as the (obviously unrealistic) feminine ideal for Irish girls. Its observations of what a teenaged girl might imagine married life to be are a sad and absurd contrast to the reality of other marriages in Ulysses.

At about the same time as Bloom begins masturbating to Gerty Macdowell, cracks begin to appear beneath the veneer of placid prose. Gerty's friends become ugly. One of them is hinted to be a lesbian. The twin boys turn into brats. I interpret these contradictions as reality shining through the cliches of romance novel, at the same time as sexuality is hinted at it in Bloom's onanism. What lies beneath romance, and guides it, sex, also overtakes it, in the form of children, middle age, your children's children, and eventually death. I interpret this as Joyce implying Tthat language cannot completely lie, that even at its most tired and inexpressive it begins to break down and suggest truth.

Who's thoughts are being channeled in the first half of Nausicaa? Is it Bloom, in an extended and vivid fantasy? Is it Gerty, in another example of the unresricted narration Joyce employs? Could it be some amalgam of both, suggesting a fanciful/fantasical meeting of minds? Or is it a third character, a new narrator invented for the reasons I've intrepreted?