ABSTRACT
Joyce wants to present an integral reproduction of human experience (external and inner experience). He reproduces the stream of consciousness, without filtrating it logically or ethically.
Here association in its various forms plays a principal role. For the most part Joyce omits to explain the genesis of an association. This is one of the reasons for the difficult comprehensibility of his work. Let us take a significant example. After midnight Bloom and Stephen stop in a cabman’s shelter. A knife is lying on the table. Stephen begs Bloom to take it away: ‘…oblige me by taking away that knife. I can’t look at the point of it. It reminds me of history.— Mr. Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article, a blunt, horn-handled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it.’ This may be found on page 590 of Ulysses. Like Bloom, the reader will not be able to understand how the knife could remind Stephen of Roman history. Nor does the author solve this question.
