James Joyce

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom emerges as one of the greatest Irish characters, a temporally indomitable rebel who shatters the regular chronology and enters into the self-created heterogeneous world for the sake of challenging Irish nationalistic sacredness. The multiple characteristics of Leopold’s subjective perception of time directs us to Alain Badiou’s distinctive ontological reading, in which he proposes the term void as an ignored ontological heterogeneity triggered by the state’s monolithic structuration. By localizing the void under the name of the event, the required condition will be prepared for the eligible subject, namely, a rebel to engage idiosyncrasy in hope of changing a future that is still in the formation. By examining Ulysses, this article explores the ways in which Leopold’s mind embraces a plethora of immediate impressions in the form of failed inconsistencies that can be used as a personal artifact in social context laden with anti-colonial sentiments to first, provide self-created truths, and then reexamine structured situations at the sudden moment of excess, bracing itself for new causal events. Moreover, the article examines miscellaneous, pithy insignificant events as narratorial tropes cast across the spatial-temporal plane of Ulysses, diverging the narrative from linear narration, and at the same time distracting the character from approximating their centrality.