A review by virtualmima
Ulysses by James Joyce

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.75

I'm surprised at how amateur this was. It reminds me of the stuff I wrote as a teenager to prank my teachers and peers. This too was evidently a prank against the uninitiated and literati alike, taking the same approach I did of making fools of pseudointellectuals who try to understand and dissect everything they read. By alluding to so many respected classical works and giving the semblance of a plot, they can be tricked into thinking there's something of importance hidden in here somewhere despite it being mostly nonsense and stupid puns. Because there's a reason behind some of the words he chose, the literary world assumes there must be significance behind every word in the book, as if it's some kind of poetic masterpiece. This is also why it's so long. The prank only benefits from an increase in length because this increases the time wasted by snobbish professors and critics. I'm not surprised at its success in such an era that a work like this would have been new, but its lasting influence and significance and the fact that people even to this day still have classes about this book taking it very seriously is kinda sad considering how goofy and sloppy and obvious it is. It could be worse but it's still not good. The image of a professor very seriously dissecting and analyzing Ulysses in front of a class full of students makes me laugh but it's about time they should figure out that everyone was the butt of his joke all along, both the people who hated it upon its release and those who praise it today.

In addition to being a prank it was also an experiment, and this is the only value it has. It's an experiment in numerous different ways that a person could approach stream of consciousness, but it is nowhere near exhaustive. This type of stream of consciousness is not the character's stream of consciousness, as in Faulkner. It is the stream of consciousness of the pen. The thoughts on paper is nothing at all like the natural flow of thought in someone's mind. It's just what happens when you rapidly write the first word that comes to mind for a few hundred pages. Whenever he forms a sentence or narrative that makes sense, you can tell that this is when he got tired and had to slow down. He must have also gotten really bored while writing it, and had to make a loose narrative to keep himself interested, to give himself something of a goal.